Human
by notmanos
Summary: Kier asks Logan to help him find his missing sister, but the search turns up ugly truths and old grudges.
1. Chapter 1

_Disclaimer: The character of Wolverine is owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics. No copyright infringement intended. The characters of Angel & Buffy the Vampire Slayer are owned by 20th Century Fox and Mutant Enemy. Bob and his crew are mine, and have retained legal services, so don't touch._

_N.B.: Takes place shortly after "X2", and directly after "Lost Souls"._

* * *

**HUMAN**

* * *

1

When you got down to it, there was only one word for the place: silly.

It was done up like some kind of Goth dungeon and looked vaguely like a place where Bauhaus might have shot a video. Chains hung down from rafters and draped the walls like streamers while chrome gleamed in the shadowy gloom that light could barely penetrate, as if the darkness were a physical thing. Where you could see the walls, it was either padded black leather (or its synthetic equivalent) or bare wood, with huge iron bolts and chrome widgets for attaching handcuffs to. But it seemed like a strangely sterile sadomasochism dungeon all the same, a "safe" place for people to come and get dirty.

Then the camera moved unsteadily as the person holding it went down some stairs, stepping into what was probably some equivalent of a basement. There were noises that sounded like a rusty hinge, but as shafts of light stabbed through the Stygian darkness, it was revealed in flashes that the noises were organic and coming from people who had been nailed to the wall.

They were impaled on wooden stakes, on metal poles, on swords and crowbars. There were half dressed guys - mostly guys, although there were one or two women - with the implements sticking out of outstretched hands and arms, out of the center of their torso, pinning their legs to the walls. Some were actually impaled parallel to the floor itself, stuck up like paintings, blood trickling from their mouths and noses, leaving greasy smears on the walls. Someone was even nailed to the ceiling; the only visible part of them was their arm, dangling down from above, a quarter sized hole in their palm, blood pouring down their arm and splattering on the floor, making a noise like water splashing on shower tiles. It almost seemed like something out of a horror movie, but there was something so grainy about this, so frighteningly real, it couldn't be dismissed as fiction.

It was the work of a disturbed mind. At least that was true.

The camera juddered, but this time because someone was stepping in front of it. A narrow light came on and revealed a man staring into the camera. A man with feral yellow eyes and a strangely distorted brow, and a mouth over full of crooked, jagged teeth; animal teeth, not Human teeth, with two very long ivory fangs standing out among the mess. He had long black hair that draped his unnaturally pale face like a shroud, and he was smiling broadly, showing all those nasty teeth. His lips were so red they may have been painted, but not with cosmetics. "Now this party's really about to start," he said, and it sounded like a threat.

It was.

* * *

He was slowly kissing his way down Faith's spine, and had just reached the tattoo in the small of her back when the constant pounding woke him up.

Logan opened his eyes reluctantly, and hoped that the noise was coming from the next room. But no, someone knocked on his door again, and he cast a jaundiced eye at the cheap alarm clock on the nightstand. The bright red numerals said it was 4:39 am - son of a bitch, he'd only gotten to bed about an hour ago. "Fuck me," he groaned, shoving himself up as the knocking continued. "Shut the fuck up," he snapped, sitting back and dry washing his face. Damn he was exhausted; worse yet, he was actually having a _good_ dream. Nobody could wake him up during his many bad dreams, but when he has a good one, here come the interruptions. Life was so fucking unfair.

As he got up, he shouted, "Who is it?"

"It's Kier. I'm sorry, I have to talk to you," came the response, strained and somewhat desperate.

Logan paused briefly, and glanced out the window before unlocking the door. Somehow, of all the people he expected to annoy him, Bren's boyfriend didn't even come within a light year of the list.

He opened the door and glared at him. "This better be good - I was having a good dream."

The pretty boy stared back at him, and he looked surprisingly stressed out for a vampire. "I thought you didn't have good dreams." He then looked down at his chest and his eyes traveled down his body and widened slightly as they went all the way down to his crotch and came back up again, finally settling on his face once more with great reluctance. "Wow. Bren was right about you."

Logan grunted in annoyance and turned away, searching his small room for his pants. He was glad he slept in his boxer shorts. Kier came in and closed the door behind him, now inspecting the small room with his gaze as headlights skated along the far wall and disappeared. "You're Bob's avatar. You could stay somewhere where you don't have to pay by the hour."

Logan found his jeans and pulled them on, giving Kier an evil glare. He could see in the dark as well as he could. "I only need a place to shower and a place to crash. Why pay five hundred dollars a night for it?"

Kier shook his head slowly, as if it was a damn shame. "You really are accustomed to the fugitive lifestyle, aren't you?"

"You got one minute before I throw you out the window."

The vampire faked a sighed, and ran a hand nervously through his hair. "Really, I didn't want to hafta bug you, but I figured you were the only one who could help me. I can't tell Bren; he'll want to help, and I'm afraid he'll get hurt. He's good, but he's not as good as you."

Logan crossed his arms over his chest. "Tell me what the fuck ya want before you blow sunshine up my skirt."

The boy sat down in the room's only chair, a threadbare little armchair that had a moiré pattern thanks to many questionable stains. "I know what you did for Xander; I know you helped him find his friend. I need you to help me find someone."

"I didn't find his friend; I found his friend's corpse. And I ain't a tracker or a private detective, okay? I only did it as a favor to Faith." And then there was his own sense of guilt, but the kid didn't need to know that. "Yer barkin' up the wrong tree."

"It's my sister, Kayla," he said, as if he hadn't been listening to a word he'd said. "She's missing."

"So? Hire a detective, call the police. Adios."

"She's a mutant," he replied, his voice taking on an edge of desperation. "She was in college at the University of Toronto. But now she's gone missing and I got …" he shook his head and reached into the pocket of his leather jacket, pulling out a folded note and a computer disk. Logan could smell Human blood on it.

"Is it hers?" he asked as he took them. He assumed a vampire would know what a family member's blood would smell like. Just to make things easier, he went to the nightstand and clicked on the tacky orange bodied lamp bolted to the table. On the letter was simply scrawled the word _"Next"_ smeared with blood, like it was a reddish-brown underline.

Kier nodded, swallowing hard and glancing down at the dingy brown carpet. It was so worn in some places it looked like it had a case of male pattern baldness. "Yeah, it is, otherwise I wouldn't have even bothered you."

At least that was nice to know. "What's on the disc?"

Kier looked at the pieces of the furniture around the room. "You don't have a laptop? Oh, what the fuck was I thinking? Of _course _you don't have a laptop." Logan wondered if he should be insulted by that or not. "It's this weird movie. It shows a bunch of people impaled to the walls of a sex club, and this vampire I've never seen before who's quite happy about it. I searched online and discovered it actually happened - seven people were killed in a club in Toronto just the other night. It made the Globe and Mail. Police have no suspects, but were horrified by the scene."

"Since when do vampire killings make the papers? I thought they were more discreet than that."

Kier shrugged helplessly, throwing his hands up in defeat. "Usually, yeah. I don't understand what the fuck that has to do with my sister, except that there seemed to be some implied threat. But, see, no one knows I'm a vampire. I mean at home, amongst my family in Canada. I send them postcards every now and again, telling them bullshit stuff like I'm doing really well in Hollywood, so I don't know how this guy - whoever the fuck he is - could even know I was a vampire, or what he wants with me."

Logan scratched his head, wishing for a beer and trying to put this all together in his head. Either he was more tired than he thought, or this didn't make sense. "Wait, wait. You said your sister is a mutant? Is this known? What can she do?"

"She can change her skin pigment at will. I know, it's no big deal, that's why she never went to a mutant school, or why we never made a big deal about it. She can always look suntanned - whoopty fucking do. She changed her skin purple for Halloween once. It's known in the family, but nobody cares."

He rubbed the space between his eyes, wondering why no one had invented a caffeinated beer yet. The road noise outside was a constant background hiss, and headlights occasionally broke through the closed curtains to flash upon the wall before leaving as fast as they came in. He wasn't in a great area of L.A., but none of these cheap motels were. "Okay, so she doesn't make it a secret?"

"Well … she doesn't announce it to strangers. But if asked she'd probably say she was a mutant."

"Does her mutant status have anything to do with her disappearance?"

"I don't know."

"Does her disappearance have anything to do with you being a vampire?"

He shrugged once again. "I don't know." When Logan groaned in disgusted, he snapped, "But you see the note! Clearly they know I'm a vampire, or I wouldn't know that was her blood!"

Okay, that was a point in his favor. "Do you have a copy of the Globe and Mail report with you?"

"No."

"What did it say? Anything about the victims, anything that might be important?"

He stared at the far wall as he thought, trying to remember what he saw. "Just that they were all patrons at a "social club" - read that as an S/M bar - and were killed in incredibly gruesome manners that lead police to suspect that there were several killers."

Which figured, because vampires were strong enough to make it look like a mob hit the joint when it might have only been one or two of them. "Was he filming it? The vampire you saw? Or was there someone behind the camera?"

Kier gave him a startled look, as if that hadn't occurred to him. "Oh shit. I … think someone else was holding the camera."

"So we're looking at two vampires at least, huh? Is it possible you knew the one behind the camera, and they just assumed you'd know the guy who showed himself?"

The boy grimaced and shook his head, looking strangely lost. "It's possible, but how the hell would I know? I don't see or hear anyone else … except the victims."

Logan glanced at the disc as he put it and the note on the nightstand. "It shows the killings?"

"Some of them. Most were still alive nailed to the walls. He ripped out their throats."

"Yeah, that's what vamps do." Logan got up and walked to the bathroom, mainly because he really needed to piss, but also because he wanted a moment to think about this in peace. There were several wrong things about all of this, but one of the most wrong things was Kier himself. Once he'd gone to the bathroom and washed his hands, he came out to find Kier still sitting uncomfortably on the chair, his face looking strained in the yellowed light of the dim lamp, hands clasped nervously between his knees. With his black jeans, Bob like biker boots, black leather jacket and loose Radiohead t-shirt, he looked like a surprisingly upscale male hustler he picked up on the Boulevard who was now having second thoughts about his profession. Logan found his tank top on the floor and pulled it on. "You gotta be honest with me here, Kier. Why the fuck do you care?"

That made him look up, surprise naked on his face. "What? Do you mean about my sister?"

He sat back down on the edge of his bed. "Yeah. My understanding is most vamps can't wait to get rid of their old lives. A lot of 'em kill their families. None send postcards."

The kid rubbed his face nervously, looking away and scratching the back of his neck, adopting tics as he tried to figure out an answer or an acceptable lie. It took him a few seconds. "I don't know. I've always been … kinda weird. I don't know why I never wanted to hurt them or disappoint them. I know that makes me weird, but I've never known why. It's like I only lost a part of myself when I became a vampire. That's why I thought I made such a good vampire - I was ready for it. I never realized it until then, though."

Could that happen? Logan just didn't know enough about what went into the making of a vampire or the destruction of the Human within to judge, but it seemed weird. After all, look what happened to Angel; when he was made a vampire, he killed all of his family. And he knew Angel wasn't the type of guy to do that, so if he could have resisted the pull he would have. What was different enough about Kier or about how he was made that he came out of his "possession" (which is what he understood vampirism to be - the infiltration of a Human by a demonic parasite that could only live on this plane in another physical entity) partially intact, if he did indeed do so? Did that have anything to do with any of this? "Where did you get this? It wasn't sent in the mail, was it?"

"I don't think so; there was no postmark on the envelope. It was just waiting for me at the bite club."

Bite club? Right, that weird place where he bit people who wanted to flirt with vampires without being in actual danger. So the hustler analogy of earlier was apt, if a little off - he didn't fuck his clientele, he just bit 'em and sucked some of their blood, giving them a sexual rush. Which seemed kinkier actually, but this was L.A.: there was surely much kinkier shit just down the road, or maybe in the room one down from him. "No one saw who dropped it off?"

He shook his head. "Not that I know of. It was found shoved beneath the door with my name on it. We all smelled the blood, but only I knew what it meant."

"How long has your sister been missing?"

"Two days. She was supposed to have spent the weekend with a friend in Windsor, but apparently she never showed up."

"Why me? Why not go to Angel with this? Maybe it's in Canada, but vamps are his thing."

He faked a sigh and sat back in the chair, looking weary as well as uncomfortable. "Because you can walk in daylight. And if there are Humans at all involved in this … I know you won't pull your punches. He usually does."

He was the bigger killer essentially then, huh? Well, he had to give the kid credit for honesty. He scrubbed a hand through his hair, wanting very badly to go back to bed, and asked the only other thing he thought might be relevant. "Do you have any enemies that might want to do this to you?"

Kier's Pacific blue eyes widened in shock, as he clearly hadn't considered that before. "In Canada? None. I mean, I wasn't always the nicest guy, but I was Human. I didn't even know the supernatural existed then. I never ran into vampires until I came to Hollywood."

Probably in more ways than one, but there was no need to point that out to him. Kier had been killed and vamped in a snuff film, hadn't he? Now there was a hell of a way to learn how this city chewed young people up and spit them out, sometimes literally, in unrecognizable bloody chunks.

And what was Toronto but the "Hollywood of the North"? Oh shit, that felt important, even in his sleep addled brain. "Did your sister ever want to be an actress?"

"She was in drama, yeah. We're all drama queens in my family, some more than others." Kier's eyes locked on his, and Logan saw the terrible knowledge bloom in them as he connected the dots. "Oh, fuck. You don't think this is related to what happened to me, do you?"

Logan shook his head. "I dunno. My neurons ain't firing at full capacity right now. But film and vamps … it makes you wonder."

"But those people in the club, there's no way they could have been actors. They're all suburban breeders who sneak into the city for anonymous fun. They'd never want to be captured on film."

"Not voluntarily. But somehow I don't think they volunteered to be crucified."

Kier stood up and started pacing in a very tight line, clenching his hands tightly together, his shoulders hunching as if he was trying to collapse within himself. "Oh god, if something's happened to her and it's my fault …"

"It ain't your fault. It's the fault of whatever sick fuck decided to nail people to the wall." Why was even trying to comfort this kid? He hardly knew him, and he wasn't sure he liked him, although he tolerated him because Bren was clearly into him, and he seemed to turn his back on Wolfram and Hart even though they set him up as a mole. Also he'd been raised in his esteem by killing all those Organization people when they tried to grab Bren. Maybe Angel didn't like it, but Logan wished he could have watched and given him pointers. The Org wanted to come after him? Fine; they'd been doing that dance for ages (way too fucking long). But go after the kids? That was fucking off limits, and they deserved every single ounce of pain that they got for it. And they could never get enough. "Look, it's nearly sunup. Get outta here. I'm gonna sack out for a couple hours, then I'll meet you at the Way Station at ten, okay?"

He stopped his pacing, but it seemed like an effort of will. "Does that mean you're gonna help me?" The piteous need on his face was almost heartbreaking … or would have been, had he been more conscious. Right now he could only observe it in an abstract sort of way.

"I'll think about it," he said, getting up and opening the door. Almost as an afterthought he grabbed the note and the disc off the nightstand and gave them to Kier as he approached. "And if you gotta laptop, bring it. I wanna see what's on the disc."

He nodded, and almost managed a smile, but not quite. "Yeah, I will. Thanks."

Logan just grunted, and as soon as he was out he shut the door on the abnormally humid night and nearly constant street noise. As he flopped down on the bed, he wondered how he was going to say no to this kid. Hell, he wasn't a detective, he wasn't even a mercenary. He was just … what the fuck was he?

He remembered Brent Ellison calling him a vigilante, and suddenly he realized that was exactly why Kier wanted his help. Logan wondered if that was a good enough reason to help him out after all.

After all, vigilantes probably ought to stick together.


	2. Chapter 2

2

He got back to sleep, but he never got back to that dream about Faith. Maybe that's why he woke up feeling so crabby. A shower didn't improve his mood, perhaps because he only had four minutes of hot water and the water reeked of chlorine, but he got dressed and headed out into another miserably humid L.A. morning.

Lau was behind the bar at the Way Station, which was good, as he never tried to engage anyone in small talk. Rags was sitting at the end of the bar, though, having his first Long Island iced tea of the day. He waved him over, but Kier was sitting at a back table, and Logan went to him. He did have a laptop, which made him feel really low tech.

The kid looked like he hadn't gotten much sleep either, although the only sign of that was simply that he didn't look as polished as he usually did. His hair was genuinely messy as opposed to artfully so, and he seemed even more pale than usual. He had a glass of goat's blood in front of him, but it appeared untouched.

Lau brought him a beer he didn't order (but didn't need to) as he watched the disc. It was just as Kier had said, an amateur home video of a nasty slaughter, and a vampire who looked like he could have been a member of a heavy metal band. But as the camera slued around to show victims getting their throats torn out, he saw some symbols glistening on the leather walls, a moist stain against the black. "How do you pause this?" he asked Kier, and the kid tapped a couple of keys on the keyboard. He had him go back, freeze the frame, and zoom in. He wasn't able to lighten up the image, so Logan had to stare at the symbols for a very long time in an effort to make them out.

"What the hell is that?" Kier asked, squinting at it.

"Cyrillic."

"Umm, what?"

"Russian. I can't … it's hard to make it all out, but I'm pretty sure it says "ascendant"."

"Ascendant? What the fuck does that mean? I mean, besides higher or whatever."

Logan shrugged, shaking his head. "Got me. But it must mean something to someone." He wondered if they should show this to Angel, who might know, or Giles. Kier didn't want to, though, because he was sure as soon as Bren heard he'd want to get involved in helping him out.

Logan scowled at him. "You really don't want him in this. Why?"

"Because he means something to me. They've already taken my sister; he'd be next."

"You're not holdin' out on me, are you?"

He looked genuinely bewildered by the question. "Huh?"

Logan shook his head and found his cell phone. Of all the times for Bob to be gone. Supposedly he was off doing something for one of his ex-wives, but it was off in another dimension, which begged the question how many wives did he have in how many dimensions? And did he really want to know? Seemed they'd all be better off if they never knew the actual answer to that question.

Logan called Giles, and asked him if he knew why the word ascendant - in Cyrillic - might mean something to a bunch of people killing vampires. He explained the strange massacre and the even stranger message, along with the fact that they left the bodies for the cops to find, but he never mentioned that this had all been intended for Kier. Giles admitted that sounded odd, even for vampires (an odd lot by nature), and while it didn't ring any bells for him, he said he'd look into it and get back to him. That was all he could ask for.

Rags came over to their table and sat down, cradling drink number two, or possibly three. "S'what's up? Anyfing interestin'?"

Logan and Kier exchanged a look, and then Logan said, "Just vamp shit. But I might be in need of a teleport."

Rags shrugged, taking a big swallow of his drink. His yellow crystal eyes looked slightly cloudy. "I got no plans today. Where to?"

"Toronto."

Rags shrugged again. "S'fine. I could use some Canadian beer anyways."

Well, who couldn't? But Logan realized that he supposed he'd just committed himself to going up there and checking this out. Still, why the hell not? Killing vamps was always easy, and he had nothing better to do right now. And he wouldn't admit it, but that whole "ascendant" thing bugged him, although he had no idea why it had gotten under his skin.

The use of Cyrillic? Or was it just that he knew any message written in blood was no fucking good at all?

* * *

Kier knew he didn't know Logan all that well. He knew him mostly from what Bren had said about him, and some stuff Angel had mentioned. The only thing he knew from actual experience was the guy was a fucking death machine on legs - which was good, because he had a feeling he needed that right now.

Why hadn't he noticed that stuff on the wall? The funny thing was he'd watched the damn movie maybe a dozen times, scanning the faces of the victims (that they bothered to show), looking for Kayla or anyone he might have recognized. But that was pointless; he didn't know any of them. He felt he should too, but he didn't.

His life back in Canada hadn't been wild or even very interesting. He lived in Vancouver, not Toronto (although he would travel for a gig), and had pursued the frustrating life of the actor. He managed to get steady work in bit parts - that CBC film, X-Files (okay, that was more of an extra part), DaVinci's Inquest, Degrassi Junior High, a stupid sitcom whose name he could no longer remember (but it was probably on his CV), a background part in a Kids In The Hall shoot, a movie or two that went straight to DVD - but it was disappointing in its general hopelessness. Did he know he'd never actually make it big? Of course he did. He went by the name Kieran David instead of his real name figuring it'd help him get more parts (because an agent told him his real last name sounded "too ethnic"), but it didn't seem to make any difference at all. He did a stage gig once, playing a small role in an avant garde play that ran in Vancouver for four months, and frankly the repetitiveness of it all bored him to tears. He could say his lines in his sleep, and pretty much did.

But he had no plan B. Since he lucked into that part in that CBC t.v. movie when he was fifteen (they changed the title three times, but he was pretty sure they ended up with "No Place Like Home"), he never went to college, just devoted his life to his "craft". Yes, he was attractive, and he had a natural kind of magnetism that seemed to draw people to him, make them like him - but was that enough? He wasn't a bad actor, but Olivier he was not.

Although it seemed ironic that he would die and be resurrected in a snuff film, it was probably actually appropriate. He'd reached the pinnacle of his "art form" long ago, and was now waiting for the next stage of his life.

Which couldn't have had anything to do with his sister or this thing in Toronto. Could it? He didn't think so, but he kept wracking his brain, trying to think back to when he was in Toronto and doing a shoot for something or other - was that club ever used? Did it look kind of familiar? He'd had a very small part in this routine American action film that shot in Toronto (he was the son of the lead's best friend in the film, which guaranteed he'd always be in trouble and quite possibly die as the film went on), and he remembered it had this kind of Goth nightclub set that was actually a location shoot. Was the massacre site the location used?

The interior didn't look the same, but that didn't mean anything. Film companies could "dress" a site, make it look different than it actually was, and there was also the fact that a club could change ownership and general clientele base. He wouldn't know for sure unless he could actually see it, especially the men's room. (The American lead, the second rate action star? Supposedly he was straight, but as Kier had learned there, no he wasn't. He was all over him as soon as they could sneak away, and he blew him in that damn bathroom, which was at least fairly clean. Whenever he saw minor tabloid reports on his many divorces and liaisons with models, Kier wondered if the reporters actually knew he preferred to blow teenage boys. Well, some of those models were so thin and so flat they could kind of pass for surrogate boys ...)

Okay, he was mentally losing the plot. Could this have something to do with when he was Human? Could this be tied in to something he once did back in Canada? He'd been scouring is brain and really didn't think so.

But ...

He just wasn't sure. No, he'd had no enemies that he'd known of, but he had some obvious moments of self-centeredness, where he was only concerned about his "career", and wouldn't have noticed if someone hated him so much they wanted to kill him, even if they followed him with a meat cleaver.

But now that Cyrillic stuff threw him off completely. What the hell was that about? He spoke English and a bit of French, but that was it. He didn't even know anyone who spoke or read Russian (except that one continuity guy, but he only knew him for as long as his role lasted). Well, okay - Logan seemed to know Russian, so he guessed now he knew someone who did. (How many languages did he know anyways? Bren said he knew every damn one, but that struck him as exaggeration. Now he wasn't so sure. He certainly hadn't exaggerated about his body, which you definitely could have eaten dinner off of.)

What did this all mean? Was Kayla already dead? He had a feeling she probably was ... but what if she wasn't? He had to try and save her, right? He couldn't live with the guilt if he did nothing and they killed her, and there was a moment of opportunity when he could have saved her.

But that made him wonder some more. Logan was right - why did he care? Vampires weren't supposed to care about anything; he wasn't even supposed to care about Bren. So what happened? Why was he different?

Why was he less selfish as a vampire than he was as a Human?

Kier felt that if he knew he might be half way to understanding all of this. But he had no idea why he thought that; it was probably unrelated to all of this shit.

They finished their drinks (well, no - he had no interest in goat's blood; he was too accustomed to the warm Human stuff from the bite club) and Logan figured they could get going. He didn't seem to realize that Kier wanted to come along, but of course he did, and they had a brief argument about that. Logan knew he could get away and no one would think twice about it, but him disappearing? Kier said he'd told Bren he was thinking of going up to Vancouver to check on his family, so he had that base covered. (Even if Bren decided to check up on him, he'd think he was in Vancouver, nearly half the country away from Toronto.) Logan clearly didn't like it, but he left him no choice. This was his sister, damn it, and he had to help, even if he was only confined to nighttime help. Logan reluctantly relented.

Logan proved he was the right one for this job because Rags pointed out that since it was day time in Toronto, and Kier was a vampire, they had to figure out a good indoor spot in which to teleport. Kier wasn't sure he knew a good spot - mostly what he knew were film and t.v. sets, with the occasional gay bar - but Logan knew lots of good spots, to the point where he had to narrow it down. While he Googled for the address of the club where the massacre occurred (he wanted to get close), Kier listened with trepidation to the jukebox. It was empathic, right, or something like that? Or was it only that way when Bob was around? He kind of hoped so on the latter, because it was playing a strangely creepy song with the opening line _"You're not human, you're a miracle, a preacher with an animal face …" _and the later line _" … will you hurt me now and make a million" _while Logan took a final glimpse at the massacre film. It gave him an odd feeling, but he didn't know why. He had no idea what any of that could mean, if it had any meaning at all. (Much like "ascendant".)

Logan decided on a place and thought about it, as Rags instructed, and once he finished his drink, they all stood up around the table and Rags grabbed Logan's arm, while Logan grabbed his. If it wasn't for the table in the way, he'd have feared a group hug was in the offing. But then Rags said something in a language he didn't recognize, and reality was ripped out from under their feet.

They were thrown down rather unceremoniously somewhere else, somewhere where there was no music and the air was less humid and much cooler, and Kier felt his head spin and his gorge threaten to rise, which was really disturbing since he was pretty sure being undead meant his vomiting days were over. He staggered away from Logan's grip and leaned against some dark and hard, struggling to hold back the urge to blow chunks. "It always sucks the first time," Logan said. "You get used to it."

Really? He didn't see how.

His eyes adjusted to the gloom, and he realized he was leaning against stacked up cartons of booze. They were apparently in the basement of a bar, which Logan knew of because he used to cage fight down here, although the cage was currently disassembled. Oh yes, more of Logan's wonderfully squalid past. The not quite dead performer side of him couldn't think that it would make a hell of a movie.

They all went upstairs, into the heart of the bar itself (Rags paused to put on sunglasses to hide his crystal eyes), and it was just as squalid as Logan's recent past: as dark as pitch, the few windows tinted (or was that just dirt?) and shaded so much that it was hard to tell it was daylight outside. It smelled of sawdust, stale beer, and misery, and the all sports network chattered on in the background, ignored by most of the career drinkers already here. They took a table in the back and ordered beers, but Kier wasn't worry about daylight. Even if someone threw the door open and an entire marching band came in, there was no way in hell any sunlight would reach him; it was as dark as the bottom of the fucking ocean in here. Leave it Logan to somehow know about a vampire's paradise.

Logan didn't stay, though; he said he'd be back and just left, getting a funny look from the bartender, a tall, bald black guy with a scalp wrinkled like an ugli fruit, and a ghostly pale scar just beneath his left eye. "When did you guys come in?" he asked them, once Logan had gone.

Rags shrugged. "Coupla minutes ago. Didn'cha notice?"

He was actually impressed how coolly Rags and Logan took this weirdness. Maybe in another decade or so, he'd get there too.

* * *

It was drizzling in Toronto, the sky the color of steel wool, the temperature unusually cool and seemingly cold when compared to the unnaturally hot weather of California. But Logan preferred it; he felt he could actually breathe, and the smell was a bit better - although not by much. It was heavy with exhaust but not so much smog, and the cold, misty rain made things smell a bit cleaner than they actually were. And since this was abutting the industrial district, that was a good thing.

The club was a couple of blocks south, although it wasn't really a club; it was a converted warehouse, which distinguished itself by having crime scene tape wrapped around its entrance point. Logan could smell the blood from the end of the block, though, and could have followed it in like a visible, physical string.

There was a back entrance, also taped, but Logan just ripped off the tape and went in, forcing the door since it was locked from the inside. It was pitch black, a deeper black than the bar, and reeked of blood, shit, death, fear. He felt briefly for a light switch, then figured fuck it, he didn't need it; he could see well enough. Some of the windows hadn't been covered over completely, and a little light bled in, just enough for him to make out the dimensions of the place. It was a series of interconnected rooms in a rectangular layout, following along the basic plan of the warehouse it used to be, and while he started following the death reek - which got stronger and stronger the deeper he went inside the building - he froze and listened hard.

His nose was too clogged with death and blood for him to smell much of anything else, but he heard a light scuff on the floor deep inside the building, a rustle of clothes.

Someone else was in here.


	3. Chapter 3

Was it a cop? He tried to parse the scents in the air, but the death and blood was just too thick, too new. He couldn't get past it.

So he proceeded inside with caution, trying not to make any noise at all, and trying to pinpoint the location of the other person before he ran into him. Not that he was worried he couldn't handle him - yeah, right - it was just he didn't need an active APB out on him right now. That was always kind of a bummer.

The person must have been in the murder room, but what would a cop be doing in there alone? It was highly unlikely, but who else would be here? Whoever they were, they had locked the door behind them. Now he was starting to get the feeling he wasn't the only illegal trespasser on site.

He popped the claws on one hand before approaching the murder room, the smell of blood nearly making him dizzy, and suddenly he heard a voice, as deep and creaky as a rusty door hinge, say, "Are you one of the guardians?"

He froze, hoping that the voice was addressing someone else, but no, they knew he was here and were talking to him. Oh fuck it. He stepped into the open doorway, braced for an attack, and faced the speaker.

Logan had had no expectations about what he was going to see, but he was still surprised. Even after he had focused on it, he wasn't sure what he was seeing. It looked like a four foot pile of spaghetti, or maybe worms, as they seemed to be moving independently of the main pile. That sound of shifting clothes was actually its tentacles - or appendages, whatever the hell those noodle strands were - slithering against the leather walls. It was a demon, but even though it looked like a mound of pasta, it smelled like blood. But how the fuck was it talking? It didn't have a face. It had no obvious mouth or eyes or ears; it had nothing. It was a pile of noodles, or maybe stretched out maggots. Either way, this was fucking disgusting. "No. What the fuck are you?"

The pile of noodles just shifted wetly, and Logan wondered if he could even hurt this thing. How did you hurt noodles? Put bad sauce on them, he supposed. Did he have time to nip out and grab a can of store brand Alfredo sauce? "Yes, you're a guardian. I see your hand."

He glanced down, and figured it meant his claws. He retracted them, because, again, how did you hurt noodles? (Overcooking?) "I'm a mutant, not … whatever."

"You're protecting him."

"Who?" It made a gurgling noise. Was that a word? In what language? "Did you say something, or did you burp?"

The pile of noodles didn't answer that question. "It's too late; the process has started. The first sacrifices were made, and the rest are under way."

"Where? Who's doing this? You working with them?"

It made a kind of wet noise, somewhere between a cough and a flush. "What business would the Brotherhood of Vestus have with me?"

"The Olive Garden wasn't open?" He rubbed his eyes, wondering why there had to be cryptic demons. Couldn't there be overly specific demons, just for a change?

"I didn't understand that."

"Forget it. Who are you, what are you doing here?"

"I am -" Again with the wet noises, like soup sloshing in a pot. "I've been sent as a warning. She's crazy; we fear she will do more damage than can be anticipated."

"Who's crazy? Kayla?" That was the only "she" he knew about in this context.

"You'll know her. She knows you."

"Who? I don't know Kayla." Did he? The world just couldn't be that small. (And Canada wasn't that small.) Although he was going to have to ask Kier if he had a picture of Kayla for him to look at, just to make sure.

"Follow the bodies. You'll find what you're looking for." And then the pile of pasta seemed to slump down and disappear, like he was phasing through the floor. But he was just gone; a disappearing pasta pile. He didn't leave a noodle behind. What the fuck was up with that?

He checked out the room, but the Cyrillic had been smudged, it was just a smear of dried blood on the wall. Who had rubbed it out? The spaghetti monster? It had been there, right? He hadn't imagined it, had he?

Logan felt slightly dizzy. Had that fucker did something to him? Or was the scent of death getting to him? He didn't know, but he suddenly felt the need to get out of here. He did, and paused in the back of the alley to catch his breath and try and clear his sinuses of the death smell. It was difficult, but then again it usually was.

Walking back to the bar, he called Giles and informed him of this new stuff, and asked if he knew what the hell the pasta demon was. Sadly, Giles just sounded puzzled, but he promised he'd look it up, along with the Brotherhood of Vestus. He had no news for him yet about the whole "ascendant" thing, but he was liking the sound of all of this less and less. He could join the club.

He was about a block from the bar when he caught a whiff of something demonic lurking in another alley he passed. He stopped and glanced in, and saw a Ressik (or maybe a Frenik - they generally looked and smelled the same, especially if they smoked a lot, and this one did). His huge tangerine sized yellow eyes fixed on him as the demon took a drag off his cigarette. "You really are one hairy dude," it said, and bizarrely it had a faint Spanish accent.

"Jealous?" It wasn't like his breed of demon had any hair.

It scowled, quite an unpleasant look on its face, and then Logan heard the burst before the bullet hit him in the back of the head, as hard and heavy as a cannonball.

Instantly he saw stars as his skull seemed to vibrate with the impact, and he dropped to his knees, and possibly to his face - he actually wasn't sure. Explosive round? Maybe. He was just accustomed to getting shot in the face; getting shot in the back of the head was a kind of new one on him.

His vision had blacked out, but he didn't lose consciousness; it was a close thing though. He sensed the demon behind him, but before he could make his stunned body react, he felt a knife stab through his neck, and the shock of pain moved through him and made him taste electricity in his mouth. He slumped to the asphalt then, but he barely felt the impact. He tried to move, and he couldn't. "How long does it take you to regrow a severed spine?" The demon asked, putting the knife back beneath his jacket. "I guess we'll see, eh ese?"

He heard the rumble of an engine, a van pulling up, and Logan felt the demon pull his limp arms behind his back and put plastic cuffs on his hands as the van doors opened and other demons came out and grabbed him. They hauled him up inexpertly, almost dropping him, and one of them bitched, "Fuck, he's heavier than he looks."

"He's full of metal, remember? That's why his head didn't explode like a cantaloupe."

"Still … fuck."

They tossed him unceremoniously in the back, and he landed face down, hard enough that it almost broke his nose. So this was a set up? By whom? How the hell did they know it was him that would respond to this?

Wow - and he thought he had a bad feeling about this already.

* * *

Kier wondered where Logan was, and suddenly realized he didn't have a watch. He looked around the bar, but there was no obvious clock. Damn it!

"How long has Logan been gone?" He asked Rags.

Rags looked at the empty beer glasses in front of him, and shrugged. "About three and a half beers."

"And how long is that?"

Again, Rags shrugged. "I dunno. If it's ten minutes per beer …"

"Fuck it." He got to his feet and went up to the bar, bringing back his own beer glass. It was virtually untouched; he wasn't a big beer drinker, even when he was Human. He'd been more of a Cosmopolitan and vodka and cranberry juice person, or as one of his boyfriends said, he drank "girl drinks". Since this was a grotty dive of a bar, their idea of exotic was rotgut, whiskey strong enough to peel paint off the walls, and he had a feeling if he asked for a vodka and cranberry the cry of "Faggot!" would echo through the bar, and he'd be forced to beat the shit out of all of them. While he enjoyed that idea, he probably shouldn't reveal his vampire status until sunset. But it would be nice to know when sunset was.

The bartender eyed him warily. He had been eying them warily since they showed up, as he didn't trust Rags' story about when they showed up, but he didn't know what the alternate explanation was. "Wanna 'nother?"

"No. What time is it?"

The bartender glanced at his watch. "Two thirty eight."

"Thank you." He returned to the table where Rags was getting slowly stewed, and although he was just sitting there, he looked like he was wavering a bit. "Logan's been gone too long," he told Rags as he slid back into the booth. "We need to get out of here."

" An' go where?"

That was a very good question. Was that gay bar open now? At least he'd know where he was in the city then. "I don't know. We gotta access the sewer tunnels so I can get around until sunset."

"I need to know where they are to 'port us there, and I don't."

"Well, go look." There was no reason he couldn't go out in daylight, was there?

Rags sighed heavily and shoved himself out of his seat, taking a moment to steady himself before attempting to walk. Okay, this was bad - Logan was missing, Rags was completely wasted, he wasn't certain exactly where in Toronto he was (these seedier areas were definitely Logan's territory), and it was hours before sundown. It was too early to say it was all going wrong, but he got a sense it was. Where the hell was Logan? It shouldn't have taken him that long to check out the club … unless he found something. But wouldn't he come back and tell them what it was? Unless he had an opportunity to get into a fight, then maybe not. Shit!

He was starting to wonder if Rags had passed out on the sidewalk when a man with a paunch and thinning, brittle brown hair, wearing a slightly stained Leafs t-shirt, suddenly loomed beside his table, a half empty beer mug in his hand. "I know you, don't I?"

Kier looked up and shook his head. "Oh god no. Sorry."

"Naw, I do," he insisted, almost sloshing his drink. "You were in, uh, that movie!"

Oh god, not a "fan", not now.

"You were Benjy, right, in Final Threat? Fuck, I loved that film!"

"You may be the only one," he replied, smiling without humor or warmth.

The guy was either too tipsy or too dense to get the "go away" vibes he was giving off. He scoffed, and said, "Sheeyeah, right - it's always out at the video store. The end, where they try and blow up the CN Tower? That was so fucking awesome! So what was it like to work with … uh, Tom whatshisface?"

"A real pleasure." And that wasn't even sarcastic - he did give pretty good blow jobs, even if it had to be in a men's room.

"Oh, and Tara Matthews! What a piece of ass. Y'really nailed her?"

"No, I didn't. We were just friends." Tara was the actress who played "Benjy's" slutty girlfriend, who was nineteen and yet already had a major boob job - funny how that worked. She seemed a little ditzy but okay, although they did have a make out scene and he had to grope her, and her breast felt as hard as rock. She said that sometimes implants were that way, and he asked her if she could deflect bullets, which she found hilarious. But he was serious; that's how hard it felt. Tits of steel.

"Oh man, I'd 've done her in a hot second."

He almost had to bite his tongue to keep from replying, _"Only in your dreams." _Her type was apparently young musicians with obvious drug problems, not 40 year old drunken pervs with man boobs.

Finally Rags came back, and almost walked into the guy. "'Scuse me, miss," Rags slurred, and it was hard for Kier not to laugh. Did he do that on purpose? "I fink I know where we can go. C'mon." Rags then staggered back towards the men's room, and Kier figured he meant for him to follow.

"Nice to meet you, but if you'll excuse me, my agent needs to talk to me," he lied, standing up.

The guy looked after Rags, somewhat confused. "That was your agent? Boy, he's loaded."

"No kidding."

He went into the bathroom, which was as grotty as the rest of the bar, and thanks to his vampire sense of smell, he was nearly overwhelmed with the rank scent of piss and urinal cakes. It made his eyes start to water, and he was glad he didn't have much of a gag reflex. "Did you find the sewer tunnels?"

"I found a sewer grate," Rags slurred, and grabbed his arm. He said the teleport words, but he slurred them so badly the first time it didn't work. He did it again, enunciating more clearly, and they were torn out of the bathroom and tossed into a darker, even worse smelling place. It wasn't quite as bad as the first time, but his stomach and head both felt like they were roiling, and he had to lean against the wall for a minute to keep his balance. Was drunk teleporting somehow worse, or was that his imagination?

"Where are we in relation to the bar?" He asked.

Rags stared at him blankly - or perhaps he did. He was still wearing his sunglasses in spite of the pitch blackness. "Underneath it, mate."

"No, I mean are we parallel to it, or in line with it? Are we on its left or right?"

He continued to stare in his direction. "We're under it."

Or Christ, this was impossible!

He sincerely hoped that Logan wasn't in trouble, because he wouldn't be rescued any time soon.

* * *

Like a severed spine wasn't bad enough, he had to listen to the two demons discuss fashion. _Fashion!_

They were apparently talking over a fashion magazine that one of them had. Logan could hear them flip the pages as they discussed whether pleats were a good thing or not, if yellow could really be a flattering color, if a sane humanoid would ever wear a skort. Was this part of the torture? Was this an insidious new method of making him crack? If it was … it was working. He'd rather they were burning his skin off with a welding torch. In fact, he was about to request it.

But things were changing. Shortly after he was thrown in the back of the van, he started to feel sharp shocks of pain along his spine, little lightning bolts of pain behind his eyes that increased in intensity as time went on, and eventually he felt every single pothole in the road that they hit - and this part of Toronto was extremely bumpy. But pain was a good thing; pain meant the nerves had grown back. The fire that was burning up the back of his legs meant that his spine had reconnected, and he could move whenever he wanted.

He couldn't break the plastic cuffs; they were just too strong, and the way his hands were turned he couldn't cut them with his claws. But they didn't bind his ankles, so he could still get on his feet, and he knew that was a fatal mistake. He could take them down with only his feet if he had to; he'd been forced to fight without his hands before. Still, if they'd been ready for him before, were they ready for that contingency too?

Then there was his own personal debate about what he wanted to do. Should he let them take him to wherever they were taking him, just to find out what the fuck was going on, or should he escape beforehand? Finding out who was behind this bullshit and why they wanted him (and how they knew he was coming) was a priority, but if they were ready to contain him it wouldn't matter what he discovered - he'd have knowledge, but he'd be trapped and unable to communicate that with anyone. What good was the information if he was trapped in an adamantium casket at the bottom of a lake?

Besides, the guys who wanted him never stopped. They just kept coming, no matter how often he escaped or carved them up like holiday turkeys. They were single minded in being complete assholes, and as such, at least the second meeting might be on more even ground. He'd be ready for them too. Also, he wasn't sure he could stand to hear another argument about which was the better color, magenta or plum. (Everybody knew it was plum.)

Logan waited until they hit another bump (he didn't have to wait long) and then rolled over on his back as if simply the jolting of the van had done it, and the two demons barely noticed. Logan arched his back and jumped up to his feet, and suddenly the demons noticed him. The one with the magazine dropped it and they both jumped to their feet, reaching for weapons, and Logan spun into a snap kick that caught the one closest to him in the side of the head. He put full force into the kick, and it sent the demon slamming into his friend, but they hit another bump and the resulting movement sent Logan falling on his ass even as the two guards hit the side of the van and went down.

He rolled over on his chest, using his shoulders to shove himself up to his knees, and then lunged at the doors. They were locked so securely they held and he felt the impact shudder through his skeleton, but then he stepped back - vaguely aware that the one of the demons was struggling back up to his feet - and ran at the doors, hitting them shoulder first.

Finally the lock gave way and he went flying out the back of the van, but he realized almost immediately they were now on a busy freeway, and the traffic was heavy. Oh shit.

He didn't even hit the asphalt before an SUV plowed right into him. He hit the hood, crumpling it like it was made of aluminum, and he went flying head first through the windshield which shattered explosively, attempting to tuck into a ball to avoid hitting and killing the driver (although if there was a passenger, he was deeply sorry, because there was no way to stop himself). He thought he heard the scream of the driver as he hit the passenger seat and broke it, flying straight into the back seat, where something metal broke beneath him but still seemed to hold, as he'd lost enough momentum not to go flying straight through the back. The car slewed violently to the side and was jolted again as someone else crashed into it, and all the windows that he hadn't broken shattered as the SUV spun around sharply, coming to a precarious stop, rocking on its tire.

He had shards of glass poking him in the back, the face, the arms, and he ached a bit from general impact, but he was already healing. He looked up to see the driver, a middle aged Asian woman in a very expensive looking business suit, was staring back at him in wide eyed shock, minor glass cuts leaving small, slightly bloody slits on her face. "Sorry about the car," he told her.

She continued to stare at him like a bunny in the headlights. "How the hell are you still alive?"

Was there ever a really good answer to that question? "Lady, I ask myself that every day," he told her, not sure if the van he'd been thrown in had pulled off to the shoulder ahead of them or not. He twisted in the broken seat, kicked out, and slammed open the rear door nearest to him. "Hope you got good insurance." He slid out and bolted for the tree choked scrubland on this side of the freeway, figuring it would be an easy place to get lost and figure out where the hell he was.

But how was he going to get the plastic cuffs off? Shit, it was always something.

* * *

As much as he hated the internet, Giles had to grudgingly admit that it did make some research easier, especially since so many Watchers had scanned crumbling old volumes of text to try and preserve them from physical decay, theft, or destruction. The new council in Australia had a huge internet library, although they probably would have been angry had they known he had access to it. (He still had some friends among the Watchers, although most wouldn't admit it.)

The Brotherhood of Vestus brought up a text from an old Watcher's journal in St. Petersburgh's, Russia, circa the late 1800's. It was apparently some kind of vampire death cult, who believed in some kind of vampire "god" coming back to the Earthly plane to lead vampires into an all out victory over humanity. But the god wasn't one of the vampire gods that he knew about, or even the supposed "father" of all vampires; it wasn't even the Master. It was an unspecified vampire "spirit" that somehow existed unfettered and was simply looking for the right vessel to contain it. The Watcher in question, a man who only identified himself as Petrov, said it was difficult to get any information about this simply because other vampires and most demons were terrified of the Brotherhood. They seemed to follow an aesthetic that made them a bit more stronger and more vicious than your average vampire, and they were waiting for specific omens that would point either towards the perfect vessel or the day of this uber-vampire's "rebirth", and the last entry in Petrov's journal said he intended to uncover what they were, so if this was a real threat they'd be prepared. An addendum noted that Petrov disappeared shortly after that journal entry, and was presumed killed by the Brotherhood.

Yet another note said that the Brotherhood was wiped out in 1901 Mongolia, when an unspecified warlock (probably a Watcher) turned a bunch of Berserkers loose on them. They hadn't been heard of since.

Until now, of course. So did one survive somehow, or did a bunch of other vampires simply take up their odd cause? The latter was more likely than the former, but it still seemed strange.

He entered the word "Ascendant" into the search function, and was treated to dozens upon dozens of pages, all of them apparently using the word in an astrological or supernatural context that seemed perfectly disconnected from what he needed. He was fairly certain that couldn't be a reference to astrology, not unless the vampires used Human entrails as divination method.

At the end of the huge volume of pages, there was an entry written in Cyrillic - or at least what _looked_ like Cyrillic; it could have been a symbolic demon language that was very close to it - and he clicked on the link.

The page suddenly went blank, the screen blacking out as if the computer had just died, and then a pop up box appeared, asking for the "password". Password? What the hell was this? Nothing on this site - which was naturally protected and encrypted anyways - was locked by password protection. There was also a small timer counting down in the upper right corner, giving him ten seconds to enter the password. When it went to zero, the screen blanked again, and kicked him back to the opening library page.

How strange was that? Since when did they restrict access to fellow Watchers? (They had no way of knowing he wasn't actually one anymore - that was the good thing about friends in high places.) That struck him has all kinds of wrong, but it was hardly the first time, was it?

He only had to think about it a moment before he picked up the phone and called Willow - as far as he knew, she was still as tech savvy as always, and if she couldn't get him into the page, she probably knew someone who could.

What were the Watchers hiding?


	4. Chapter 4

3

Logan lucked out by eventually coming across a tool shed, where he was able to weaken the cuffs by rubbing the plastic ties across the blade of a saw until he could simply pull them apart. He cut his hands and wrists a couple of times, but he healed, so it was no big deal. But the guy whose shed this was might wonder where the drops of blood came from.

He was outside Toronto proper, but not too far. He still had his cell, so he tried to call Rags, but his cell phone wasn't on. He didn't know Kier's number, if he had a cell phone. Did vampires have them as a rule?

He hated to do it, but damn it, he needed to get back to the city as fast as possible. He broke into a ludicrously expensive car and hotwired it in his own special way (some Yuppie would have his Lexus insured up the ass, which is why he didn't feel bad stealing it), taking off for the city once more.

Had Kier betrayed him? It wouldn't be the first time he'd sold someone out - he came in as a mole, after all. Still, this seemed needlessly elaborate, and it didn't quite explain the spaghetti monster. But then again, he wasn't sure anything would explain the spaghetti monster. That was a new one on him, and previously he'd have claimed he'd seen just about everything. He tried calling Giles, but his number was busy, so he figured he was still working on things.

He abandoned the Lexus two blocks from the bar and went back on foot, but Rags and Kier were gone, and the bartender had no idea when they left, not to mention where they went. He took a gamble that they 'ported out to the sewers (the sun was still out, somewhere beyond all those steel wool clouds) and found a way in through a manhole cover in the street behind the bar. It was hard to pick up a scent in a sewer, unless you were after something that smelled like shit, but Rags smelled so strongly of booze and fresh celery (all Persaids smelled like celery - why he had no idea) that he could pick him up. Oh sure, the trail was amazingly faint beside the overwhelming reek of Human waste, but it was there.

He followed it for about a mile, following the twist and turns of the underground system, but the trail got stronger the closer he got. "Rags!" He bellowed, really putting his diaphragm into the shout. He bet they could hear him topside. "Kier! Where the fuck are you guys?!" He continued on for a few hundred meters, but as he turned another corner, scaring a sewer rat the size of a dachshund, Rags and Kier popped into existence about twenty feet away from him.

Kier instantly ripped his arm away and staggered against the wall as if about to fall on his face. "I told you I could walk," he complained.

Rags seemed to ignore him. "So where've you been?"

"Got kidnapped by Ressiks. Or maybe Freniks, I'm not sure. They look alike. They were ready for me; they knew who I was."

"What?" Kier seemed surprised, and it was genuine; even down here, Logan was close enough that he could have smelled a lie. "How the hell could they have known that?"

"Kid, you tell me. I got no clue."

"Maybe t'ey gotta steer," Rags slurred.

Logan stared at him, sure he hadn't heard him right, but what else could that word have been? "A steer?"

"No, not a steer, a _sheer_," Rags insisted.

He glanced at Kier, who shook his head. He wasn't sure what he was saying either. How many beers had Rags had? Was he gone that long? Rags pointed at his sunglasses (why did he still have them on?) and said, "A sheer, y'know? A person who shees fings."

He finally got it. "Are you saying a seer?"

Rags clicked his tongue, looked up at the ceiling, and then almost fell over. Logan reflexively reached out and steadied him. "Yes, I'm sayin' sleer. Jesus, don't y'guys speak English?"

Kier rolled his eyes, and Logan sympathized. He'd left him to deal with Rags, who had clearly been pounding back the alcohol at an alarming rate, and the fact that he had become even more incoherent than usual was just icing on the cake. "If they have a seer, we're screwed," Kier pointed out. "Especially if they know we're coming for them."

"Here's the question - who the fuck is _them_? I thought we were after vampires, but now it seems we've got spaghetti monsters and Ressiks in the mix."

Kier stared at him in disbelief. "Spaghetti monster?"

"Ressiks are mercs - anyone can 'ire 'em if you got th' dough," Rags countered. It was a good point.

He caught them up to speed on what little he'd learned, and what he had encountered. Logan had been hoping that things would make more sense once he said them out loud, that pieces he hadn't really noticed would click into place, but it didn't. It remained baffling, and more than a little irritating.

They had been set up. But who had done it and why remained unknown. And that was the biggest pisser of all.

* * *

It took a while, but Willow not only got him into the protected part of the website, but also found him a translation program. The problem was, the translation program wasn't quite up to the job.

Either the language was poorly rendered or the program was poorly done, but only partial paragraphs came out, most cut with good portions of gibberish. But from what Giles could discern, "Ascendant" was the name of some program instigated by a group of Watchers in Russia in the late 1800's. It was decided (by whom?) that Slayers simply weren't enough in the unending fight against evil, especially when it came to vampires. So Ascendant was considered a possible answer by utilizing the pseudo-science of eugenics and something else. There were a couple of references to something called "the elixir", but it wasn't explicitly discussed - or at least not in any passages that weren't complete gibberish. But even in this scattershot, bare bones rendition, Giles found it utterly appalling. The Watchers indulged in eugenics and experimenting on Humans - unsuspecting Humans at that? Horrid. No wonder they locked that information away. There were indications the program had been "terminated", but the use of that specific term sent a shiver down his spine. Had they killed all their experimental subjects? That was something demons would do, not Humans (or at least one would hope). He knew that many Watchers embraced the idea of committing a few "lesser" evils in the course of defeating greater evil, but it had never set well with Giles - even though he had committed a few in the past - and it still didn't. He did what he felt he had to do at the time, but no more. This program, even if it was instigated by a renegade group of Watchers, was abominable, and he wasn't even sure of all the details.

But why were there a bunch of vampires who presumably knew about this, for one, and second of all, why were they bringing it up now? Ascendant had been dead since the early days of the 1900's - it was a failed, hideous bit of Human experimentation, buried deep in the Watchers archives, so deep he could barely find it.

But these _were _vampires they were dealing with. One of them could have been alive (so to speak) back in those days and been aware of what those Watchers were doing or trying to do. But that didn't explain why they were bringing this up now. The Watchers were down and pretty much out. Oh sure, the survivors had decided to rebuild and had regrouped in Australia, the continent with the largest group of surviving Watchers to begin with (proving that the constant joke around British HQ that the "hardest" Watchers were in Australia and China respectively was apparently not a joke at all), but the Watchers had been decimated; it was a wounded entity now. And with all potential Slayers now active, that should have more than evened the playing field between good and evil.

Yet it hadn't. All it had done was confuse the issue. And shouldn't that have been expected? Unlike Humans, demons didn't actually evolve; they were very static entities, which was what pretty much doomed them, but they could adapt if they were clever or desperate or something of both. Many demons seem to have adapted, or at least curried the favor of stronger, more vicious beings.

All of this was making his head ache and his stomach burn. In hopes of avoiding an ulcer, he changed his focus to discovering this "pasta demon" Logan had mentioned. Eventually he dug up an obscure being known as a Tali demon. It was supposedly a type of messenger between the higher and lower realms, a type of collective entity that was made up of several different pieces that existed in several different places simultaneously, and was often described as looking like a tangle of string or a pile of worms. But they didn't exist naturally here or anywhere, so how did Logan come across one? It wasn't like he was favored by the gods, who'd throw a warning into his path if he needed it.

Oh wait, he was the favored of _one_ god - Bob. Could he have sent the Tali to him? Or could one of Bob's friends done so? Hell, even one of his enemies could have sent the Tali on, just to confuse some issues.

He called Logan to let him know what he'd dug up, but the first time he didn't get through. The second time he did, but the connection was so poor it seemed like he was shouting into a tin can. "I'm in a sewer," Logan explained.

Giles almost asked if he meant that figuratively or literally, but decided it was best not to know.

He briefed him on what little he had, but the Ascendant information, as meager as it was, interested him more than he expected. "Wait - were the Watchers experimenting on mutants?"

That possibility hadn't even occurred to him. "I don't think so. They weren't aware of their existence then; I'm not sure anyone was."

"But they were trying to create or at least utilize people who could fight the demons, right? Mutants would be great for that. Well, some of 'em."

"Perhaps. But all I have here is incomplete sentences on inhuman experiments, and something called an "elixir", which isn't clarified in the least."

"Do you still have the untranslated pages?"

"I saved them, yes."

"Why don't you email them to me? I'll see if I can read 'em."

He wasn't sure if Logan was disparaging his ability to translate pages of incomprehensible text or not. "I'm not sure it's even in a proper language."

"I don't care. I can give it a shot. What do we got to lose at this point?"

That was fair enough. After writing down Logan's rather silly email address, Logan asked, "Is there any protection at all against a seer or a psychic?"

"It would depend on the type you were dealing with. Most often the answer is no."

"Most often? There are exceptions?"

Giles sighed, pinching his eyes shut. He hated talking in vague generalities. "A few. Is Rags there with you?" He thought he heard Cockney complaining in the background, and Rags's voice was hard to mistake for anyone else's.

"Sadly."

"He's a High Priest of the Gorgons, is he not? He should be able to put up a protection spell around you. It might not shield you from all psychics, but it could blind you to some." Giles listened as Logan relayed this information to Rags, and the connection was so bad that Rags' voice was just a blurry connection of random noises … or was that the connection? Was he extremely intoxicated? Because he was British, and yet he was fairly certain he'd never heard a Cockney accent quite that thick before. It was like paste, something sludgy and cloying to the ears, and nearly as garbled as the Ascendant files.

He nearly asked him if he needed help, but ultimately didn't, because something told him he would regret it almost instantly. Working with Logan would have been bad enough; working with Logan and Rags together would have been a bit too much.

4

It took Rags approximately twenty minutes to think up a workable spell, and another twenty minutes for him to cast it, as he stumbled over several words, mangling them to the point of nonsense. Seemingly; even at the best of times, it was hard to tell with Rags. They just had to take his word on it that he got the spell right, as nothing happened, but Rags insisted something had occurred.

Kier's phone (yes, he had one) had a GPS in it, and using that Logan figured out where the hell they were. They kept to the sewers, though, and Logan got close enough that he risked climbing up to the surface. It was still raining, still grey, but he didn't see or smell any demons in the immediate vicinity, and he went ahead into the public library.

It was very uncrowded, for which he was grateful, as he wasn't sure he didn't still smell of sewer. It was a fairly new complex, he could still smell the paint and carpet glue, with a high ceiling and skylights that showed how oppressive the sky was outside. The books were in shelves set up like hedgerows, leading into the back of the building, but off to the far left was a small nest of tables set up with public access computers. A couple were occupied, but most weren't.

Damn it was peaceful in here. He was so glad he came up with some bullshit reason for Rags to stay in the sewers with Kier, because frankly, the guy needed to sober up a bit. Also, probably take a shower. His strong smelled helped him track them through the sewers, but it had now ended its usefulness.

He logged into his email account, and after deleting what seemed to be three years worth of spam, he found the files Giles sent him. Logan stared at them for the longest time, recognizing them … and yet not quite. It was like a highly stylized form of old Cyrillic, almost a cipher … and yet the more he stared at it, the more it started clicking into place in his mind. Did he almost recognize this? He was nearly getting a sense of déjà vu here, but as with many things, he didn't know why. It was like his mind was blind to everything but the merest glimmer of light.

Giles was right about Ascendant being a eugenics program, a way to breed new warriors for the fighting evil cause, but here's what he missed. The "elixir"? It referred to "demon aspects" - the idea was to essentially inoculate people with weak traces of demon elements in the hope that they or their descendants would manifest demon aspects without being demonic or truly influenced by the demonic. Apparently this ended up in lots of death; lots and _lots _of death. Survivors were often left sick and weak, diminished in some capacity, making the whole experiment seem like an extended exercise in both futility and cruelty.

But they kept going. Of course they did, because otherwise their legacy as total rat bastards would have been pissed away. But nothing much ever came of it, although they felt they had some success with a couple of subjects, namely because they weren't dead or confined to a sick bed. They weren't well, though; they certainly had no "aspect of the demon" about them. It could only be considered a victory in that they were still breathing somewhat regularly.

Finally someone came to their senses and put an end to the program, but it wasn't clear what they meant by "end". Oh sure, they stopped injecting suspecting and unsuspecting people with shit, but did they kill off any subject that managed to survive? There were implications in "total sterilization", but nothing explicit. So they were okay with conducting and recording inhuman medical experiments, but not mercy killings? Those were some fucked up morals. They could have worked for the Organization.

Now the documents were so easy to read he had no idea why he couldn't read them in the first place. There was a mention of some vampires becoming aware of the experiments and resenting it to a high degree, to the point that they were killing off anyone that had anything to do with Ascendant. But they ran into a problem - it seems that a couple were killed off by an unknown assailant, in a way consistent with a Slayer. Except there were no Slayers in Russia at the time; the Slayer was supposedly in India at this time. Now there were concerns that there were other demons watching and waiting to see the result of the Ascendant trials, which bothered the Watchers a great deal. After all, if demons liked it, could it be any good? They were the "enemy", after all.

He heard screams at the front of the library, and suddenly an explosive barrage of gunfire that inspired more screaming and ducking under tables as a Ressik in a neat, dark Prada suit came in, holding up a rather large automatic rifle. "Everybody be cool! We just want the hairy guy, and then we'll be on our way." Behind him, a small army of fellow Ressiks filed afterwards, fanning out into the library.

"Oh, great spell Rags," he cursed under his breath, wondering where to make his stand.


	5. Chapter 5

The worst part was this whole confrontation taking place in a library. He loved books, and he just knew many of them were going to get hurt - along with innocent people, if he didn't do this right. Why did this kind of shit always happen to him?

They hadn't seen him yet, so he slipped back into the stacks, hoping that he could intercept them without too many shots being fired. The Ressiks were fanning out, coming through the stacks with their guns ready, making startled people flee before them, some screaming and some not, but all of them pretty freaked out. Logan stood at the end of the aisle, back against the end of a bookcase which also blocked him from view, and waited for one of the Ressiks to come to him. Finally one obliged, coming out gun first, and Logan spun and grabbed the gun with one hand, and with the other he punched him in the face, popping his claws at the last second.

The demon tried to alert the others, but his claws already punched through his skull, and as Logan pulled his hand back the Ressik collapsed, thudding to the carpeted floor. The noise was well covered by all the other noises in the library. One of them was even shouting, "C'mon mutie, it's chickenshit to hide!"

Ideally, he could take them all out one by one, and keep one conscious and capable of talking long enough to figure out who the hell was after him, but he knew Ressiks didn't have a reputation for being cooperative. Still, maybe they just hadn't had the right impetus.

He tucked the gun in the waistband of his jeans - he wasn't going to use it unless he absolutely had to - and took out three more Ressiks in the aisle, killing them quietly (or at least seriously wounding them - it was hard to tell with Ressiks) and ruining their guns in the process, but one of the Ressiks found a body, and started spraying bullets wildly through the stacks. Logan crouched down as the bullets slammed through the books and wooden shelves, throwing shredded paper and splinters all over the place. The bullets were louder, more destructive than they should have been, which definitely meant they were explosive rounds.

After the fusillade died down to a ringing in his ears, he heard one of them shouting from the front of the library. "Hey mutie! Show yourself now or I'm gonna kill this bitch!"

Oh great - did he have a hostage? That seemed to be the implication.

He tried to sneak up towards the front, wanting to get a better look at the Ressiks and see how many there were and where before they saw him, but then he heard a loud, pained _"Oof!" _followed close behind by another one shouting, "Fucking A! What do you think you're doing, bloodsucker?!"

Logan glanced around the corner of a bookshelf, and saw that Kier had joined the fray and had engaged about a half dozen Ressiks. They were too close in to shoot him, but there was also the problem that he was a vampire and bullets could only hurt him, not stop him for long. Rags presumably had teleported them both in, but he didn't see Rags anywhere.

The Ressiks ganged up on Kier, trying to swamp him, and with their backs turned, Logan popped his claws and charged in. He didn't get fancy or detail oriented - he simply slashed the first bit of lizardy thing he saw, dropping them left and right in various stages of wounded. One of them shot him from the floor, the bullets tearing through his right leg and shredding his calf muscle, the pain sharp and so sudden he nearly dropped to his knees. But he could use that pain, that rage, and he let it propel him onward.

One of the Ressiks had grabbed Kier and thrown him down on a table, making it shatter beneath him, which gave the Ressik a convenient weapon to use against him. But as the Ressik raised the sliver of wood to stake him, Logan slashed through his arm, cutting it off, which really surprised the Ressik. He looked at his shoulder, as if curious why his arm wasn't responding to his nerve impulses, but before he could react to the loss of limb Kier got both feet up and kicked him hard in the chest, sending him flying backwards into an intact buddy.

Bullets raked his back, exploding in his body and sending savage, blinding pain shuddering through him. This time he did drop to all fours as he saw nothing but red behind his eyes, the pain like a humming in his ears, but it stopped in an animalistic snarl and the dull, hard sound of flesh on flesh, as Kier took out the gunman.

As soon as Logan could catch his breath - he was pretty sure one of the bullets caught his lung - he shouted, "Keep one alive! We need him!" He wouldn't have to worry about that if it was Angel who was taking on the Ressiks, but this was Kier - he'd already proven he didn't mess around. Mercy wasn't a quality he had in abundance.

By the time he got back to his feet and slashed through the rest of the standing Ressiks, he and Kier were clearly winning. It looked like a couple snuck out of the library as he was driving his claws through the midsection of a sickly green Ressik and Kier was snapping the neck of a brownish-grey one.

Another Ressik grabbed him in a choke hold that would have done the LAPD proud. He had an arm as thick as a man's leg, and the demon was attempting to cut off both his air supply and the blood flow to his brain. Logan started throwing his elbow back rapidly and hard, turning his face into pulp, but the Ressik wasn't ready to let go yet. Even as Logan started to black out he continued throwing his elbow, the demon's coppery blood splattering on the back of his neck as his consciousness started to waver. This fucker was just hanging on like a bulldog, so he twisted his arm around and stabbed back blindly, finally hitting something painful, as he yelped and loosened his chokehold. Logan spun out of his grasp and slashed as he turned, cutting his head into four separate pieces.

Logan was still catching his breath as he heard Kier let out an inarticulate shout of pain, and he spun to see a big, thick necked Ressik, about the size of your average refrigerator-freezer, had driven a jagged wooden table leg through Kier's back, slightly south of his right shoulder. Before Kier could recover, the guy pulled out a silver bladed knife almost as big as a machete and drove it through Kier's stomach, using the brunt of the impact to drive Kier to the floor and pin him there, with the knife through his belly.

But before he even looked up, Logan had him. He spun and kicked him in the side of his head full force, something in his skull cracking as he staggered aside, and then he punched him, letting his claws puncture his face. He collapsed to the floor, dazed and bleeding but not unconscious (this one could take a lot of damage).

"Little help," Kier gasped, trying to pull the knife out of his own stomach, but the knife was well buried in the floor.

Logan grabbed the shaft of the blade and yanked up, ripping it out of the floor and his belly, and he swallowed a scream as he grabbed his stomach and rolled over on his side. "I'd thank you but I'd rather punch you," he wheezed.

Logan returned to the Ressik, who was starting to get up, and pinned him to the floor by stabbing the knife through his stomach. The Ressik made a pained noise and reached for him, but Logan intercepted him with his claws, and pinned his arm down to the floor with them. That finally made him scream as Logan buried a knee in his gut and held his other fist over his bleeding, perforated face. "Okay sunshine, ya wanna live? Talk. Who hired you?"

The Ressik, who was as green as a fern with eyes as yellow as the sun, spit brackish blood at him. "Fuck you, meat bag!"

Kier, who was on his feet in spite of the bloody wound in his gut, stamped hard on the Ressik's left hand, which had been free until that second in time. He ground his heel in, making his finger bones snap and crackle like kindling in a fire. "You wanna live to spend your fucking money? Spit it out. Or we're sending you back to your crew in a box," he snarled, still in vampire face.

Logan moved his free hand down from the Ressik's face to his groin, his fist hovering two inches above it. "You've got five seconds, Kermit, then I turn you into a eunuch. One … two …"

"Okay okay, Jesus," he spat, trying to twist his arm from beneath Kier's feet. (No go.) "We were hired by these vampire fucks, I think they called themselves the Brotherhood of … something. I don't know, some made up word."

"Why do they want me?"

"They don't. They wanted us to get you outta town, dump you off at some kinda military base or something. They said you were trouble, and they wanted you gone ASAP."

"Why?"

The Ressik glared up at him, anger hiding the pain. "Like I said, they thought you were trouble. They didn't care how visible we were. They said every second you were around was a second too long."

"Do they know me?"

He scoffed, although it sounded a bit like a gargle. "Fuck if I know, man. I don't hang with parasites, I just go where the money is."

"But they said I was trouble."

"Yeah, the crazy bitch seemed to think you could ruin everything, and the bloodsuckers seem frightened of her, so they just went along with it."

Logan started to get a bad feeling about this - well, worse than before. "What am I supposed to ruin?"

"I already said I don't know. I don't ask for details as long as the cash is good."

"Did they have a Human girl with them?" Kier asked. "Did you see?"

The Ressik's huge eyes rolled towards him in what seemed to be contempt. "The bloodsuckers came to us. There was just the crazy bitch, the long haired freak, and a couple of other random parasites. They didn't bring a snack." That last comment made Kier grind his heel in further, since he was clearly asking about Kayla. Too bad the demon had no idea he was asking after his sister, or he could have saved himself another broken finger.

The long haired freak was obviously the vampire from the homemade snuff film. But this "crazy bitch" he kept mentioning was starting to gnaw at him. It couldn't be … could it? "Where did they come to you? Where did they hire you?"

"A bar called Oubliette. But you don't wanna go there, meat, not unless you wanna end up on the menu."

"Oh right, a demon bar. I'm shaking. So who's the crazy bitch? She got a name?"

The Ressik glowered at him, like he wasn't pinned down to the floor by a variety of sharp implements, like his blood wasn't soaking into the carpet beneath them. "Prob'ly. I don't know it."

"What did she look like?"

"Small, black haired, skinny, pale. A Goth chick vamp, only bugfuck nuts. She couldn't even put a coherent sentence together."

Oh yes, he knew exactly who it was, and this was horrible news. After a moment, Logan glared down at the Ressik, and said, "I'm an avatar of the Powers That Be. Tell your crew to take the money and run as far from here as possible, or I'll have you all burned down to ash. This is your only warning." Before he could respond, he grabbed the Ressik by the head and smashed it as hard as he could into the floor. The Ressik's eyes rolled up into his head, and he went limp.

"Do you know who he's talking about?" Kier wondered.

He withdrew his claws from the demon's arm, then grabbed the knife and yanked it out of his gut. An extra blade could always come in handy, especially one as nasty as this one. "Yeah, I'm afraid so." Once he got to his feet and looked around, he asked, "All the people left?" There were just dead, dying, or seriously injured Ressiks laying around, but no one else.

"Oh. Once I heard the gunshots, I told Rags to teleport us up here. Rags said he'd get the people out 'cause he wasn't a fighter. I thought he was just saying that so he didn't have to fight, but I guess not."

"I don't think Rags would have been much of a help anyways." He was too drunk to fight, basically. Also, as far as he could tell, Rags left the fighting to other people - he was not by nature a brawler.

"Who's the vampire he was talking about?" Kier prompted impatiently.

It explained a lot if he was right. It explained how they knew where he was, how they knew he was coming, and how to prepare for him. It also complicated things immeasurably. "Angel ever tell you about a vampire named Drusilla?"

Kier frowned down at his gut wound as he thought, but then looked up sharply, the surprise visible even as he morphed back from vampire to Human face. "No, but Bren told me about her. Holy shit! The freako vampire chick? Her?"

He shrugged with his hands. "She has some kinda precognition powers, although I'm not sure they actually deserve that name. She just knows shit she shouldn't know. And yeah, she's as crazy and vicious as a starving shithouse rat. If she's mixed up with the Brotherhood of Vestus, we're in even deeper crap than I thought."

There was something stark and harrowing about his expression as he stared at him, like whatever last smidgen of hope Kier had been hanging on to had just died. "That means Kayla's probably dead, doesn't it?"

Did he lie to the kid, or just make a wild guess? Logan honestly wasn't sure which would be better; he didn't know enough about Kier's personality to know which would make him easier to work with. "Not necessarily. Dru isn't known for subtlety. If she wanted her dead, she'd be dead - she wouldn't have bothered to kidnap her. She'd have left her corpse out for us to find."

"Or she's changed her already."

Also a possibility, one he didn't like to think about. Sure, Kier was already a vampire, but clearly he didn't like the idea of his sister joining him amongst the undead, and Logan couldn't blame him. Kier turned away and started stalking towards the door, and a Ressik on the floor struggled to get up. Kier kicked him hard in the face and he went down again. "Hey, where did you learn to fight?" It was partially to distract him from broody thoughts about his sister, but it was also a question that just started nagging at Logan. The kid was good - he held his own pretty well against the Ressiks before Logan intervened, and that didn't count his taking on of the succubus and the Organization strike team back in LaLa Land. If he was an old vampire he wouldn't have any trouble with the idea, but this kid hadn't even been undead for ten years, had he? He was a newbie, and as he understood it, the newbies - while stronger than your average Human - were still easy pickings when compared to your older vamps. Also, it wasn't like Kier was a soldier or even a weightlifter when he was a regular Human - he was an actor, for Christ's sake. All they could do was look pretty and complain.

Kier paused, turning back with some reluctance. "Well, I learned to stage fight, but I know that's not what you mean. When I was a kid I got black belts in judo and tae kwon do, and I took kickboxing to avoid kendo. I mean, I'm sure kendo's great and all, but fighting with bamboo swords? What the hell's the point of that?"

"Kendo teaches supreme discipline. It hones you as a weapon, body and mind." Logan realized what he was saying, and stopped. "Where the hell did that come from?"

"You're asking me? Besides, Bren said you knew, like, every fighting style known to man, so why are you surprised you'd know that one?"

"I don't. I mean … I'm fairly certain I don't know _every_ fighting style. Or if I do, I don't know I do." He shook his head, getting back on track. "We're talking about you. Why all the training?"

Kier shrugged a single shoulder, grimacing slightly. "I dunno. My parents were the kind of people who thought you weren't maximizing your potential if you weren't always learning something, so Kayla and I always had our days packed full of stuff. Actually, the kickboxing was really good; it's good cardio, and it kept me in shape, which is important when you're an actor. You can only be a schlubby character actor type if you're really good, and I wasn't there yet." He mimicked a heavy sigh. "I guess I'm never getting there now, eh? And cardio - what bullshit. I can't even remember what it feels like to have a beating heart." He unconsciously rubbed his chest, as if searching for the heart long since still.

"You miss being alive." An obvious thing to say, but it seemed important somehow. The only vampire he knew that hadn't been happy with their lot in life was Angel, and that was only because he had a soul.

Was that was what was going on here? Kier was concerned about his sister, missed being a living, starving actor - did he have a soul? How? As he understood it, that was a curse - that wasn't something that could just happen. And the circumstances under which Kier died and was transformed didn't support a curse scenario. So what was going on with him?

Rags staggered in the door, leaning against the jamb like his legs were giving way, as thunder rumbled and shook the building. "It's dark enough we can walk away from 'ere, if yer done," he pointed out, his syllables starting to get mushy.

"Yeah, give me a second," Logan said, returning to the computer stations. He found one that hadn't been accidentally shot and started printing out the untranslated documents Giles had emailed him.

Dru thought he was trouble, huh? Did it have anything to do with this? He had no idea, but he wasn't taking any chances. The answers to the Brotherhood of Vestus could be here, and he wasn't about to let it slip away that easily.

* * *

Sometimes life seemed like one continuous deal with the devil. Or at least lately.

Revol heard the crashing and smashing in the next room, shattering glass and heavy thuds, along with the occasional scream. Jack finally appeared in the doorway as he squeezed the last bit of blood out of the girl's wrist. She was just a corpse slumped on the loveseat now, some dippy little sixteen year old in a baby tee and a skirt so short it almost pulled up to her waist the second they shoved her down on the settee. While young, fresh blood like this was always delicious, these anorexic little tarts never had much blood in them. It was depressing.

"She's upset," Jack said, running his hand over his bristly blond hair. Jack was a bit of a Teutonic stereotype in vampire form - tall, built like a brick shithouse, blond haired and blue eyed - and even had a livid scar running diagonally across his left cheek. Put him in a Nazi uniform, and he could have been an extra from a World War Two movie. The funny thing was, he was in the war, only not on the German side. When he got drunk, he'd sometimes ramble interminably about how he got his scar in the battle of Stalingrad.

"No fucking kidding," Revol snapped irritably, as yet another something shattered violently against the wall. "I hate this screwy bitch."

Jack shrugged, shoving the girl's corpse to the floor so he could sit down on the loveseat. Jack's real name had been lost to time, along with his accent, but that was okay - Revol lost his name deliberately. He just wish he could lose some other things just as easily. "But I thought the oracle said -"

"- our best chance of success is with her. Yes, I know." And he hated it, but the Brotherhood was a shambles, a sad, pathetic vestige of what it used to be. Their only hope laid in finally getting the Ascendant, in bringing back Vestus. When he'd discovered last month that there actually _was _an Ascendant, that all the signs were in place, he was almost shocked dumb. He'd all but given up on it.

But the Watchers said it; the Watchers wanted the Ascendant dead before the Brotherhood could find them. And if the enemy was so hot after something, you had to go after it yourself. That was the nature of war, after all.

Drusilla was screeching something about the Ressiks, but Revol had already figured it out. They had failed, like he had half expected them to. Yes, they were god killers, demons made to kill everything in their path, but if this was the Ascendant - or the Ascendant was amongst this group of people - it wasn't going to be that easy. Forces would align in their favor.

Drusilla seemed to think they could escape a big confrontation, but it wasn't meant to be. Which was fine with him, actually. She thought they were following her orders, but he'd been the leader of the Brotherhood for almost a century now, and he wasn't about to cede control to some vampire with bats in her belfry, no matter how much the other vamps were afraid of her.

Now it was time for plan B.


	6. Chapter 6

5

It quickly became apparent that they needed to dump Rags somewhere, preferably out of the way. The wind did have some pretty strong gusts, but nowhere near strong enough to knock someone over, which is what nearly happened to Rags several times. How drunk did you have to be? Seriously.

Logan pulled him into the nearest hotel, where the desk clerk gave them a funny look. Three guys wanting a single room? If that just didn't scream "gay orgy", what did? It didn't help that Kier, sensing both this presumption and disdain, decided to camp it up a bit, adding a lisp and asking if they had a hot tub large enough for a group. Part of Logan just wanted to punch him in the head, and the other part wanted to laugh his ass off - he was really horrifying the clerk, who couldn't completely show it. That was always fun. Marc really would have enjoyed this.

Rags had a credit card for a "David Radison", which seemed to be valid and go through, but Logan didn't ask him about it until they got up to the room. Rags said it wasn't stolen but a valid card, acquired for him by Thrak, who furnished lots of demons with "passable" Human i.d.'s. Thrak supposedly had a taxi license under the name "Tad Watson". (Tad? Really?)

Rags collapsed on the bed, and within five minutes was snoring away, leaving him and Kier to try to figure out their next move.

The Oubliette wasn't exactly listed in the phone book, but Kier thought he knew of a way to find it. There were certain "demon sections" of town - all big cities and even some small ones had demon sections, whether they knew it or not - and Kier felt if he went there and asked around he'd be pointed in the right direction. Of course if he had a Human with him it would bugger things up ... unless he was his "thrall", a kind of addled vampire groupie. Which he already knew of, since he went through this with Yasha in Tokyo. "We are not making out," he told him. "If you have to kiss me or punch me, punch me. Just aim for a fleshy part, or you'll break your hand."

"You don't want to kiss me? I'm heartbroken," he replied, putting on a sad face. He couldn't hold it for long; a big smile lit up his face, making him look frighteningly young and Human. How old was he when he was turned? Twenty two? "Why would I kiss you? Thralldom isn't always a sexual thing."

"I've just ... I've faked it once. Kissing seemed to be involved."

"Really? Was it with Angel? 'Cause I have to admit that's kind of an enjoyable mental picture."

"I'm gonna punch you now."

He stepped back quickly, raising his hands in a warding off gesture and chuckling. "I'm done. It's gone from my mind, swear to god." From his goofy grin, he didn't think that was true.

What was it with him and smart asses? Could he not know anyone who wasn't a smart ass? (Okay, there was Cyclops, but he was a tight ass, and they annoyed him even more than the smart asses. There was just no way to win.)

Still, traveling as Kier's thrall or not, there might be a certain danger to him if the Oubliette was a really rough demon bar - Bob's was actually an oddly peaceful and contained one, probably because the proprietor was a god who wasn't going to take any shit. (It also helped that Helga, the toughest demon in the West, was the manager.) Logan told him he could handle it, but Kier really wasn't worried about that - he was worried about the two of them possibly having to fight an entire demon bar. Again, Logan didn't see the problem. He'd fought entire bars before all by himself, and he'd already come to the conclusion that Kier wasn't your average vampire, so he was sure they could take 'em if they had to, and with little in the way of problems.

Rags wasn't so much sawing logs as chainsawing a forest when they left, and he wondered if someone on the floor was going to make a noise complaint about him. If so, he kind of doubted Rags would wake up to answer the phone or the door, so he hoped the hotel had a big stock of ear plugs.

Logan had brought the print outs with him, as he wasn't completely done reading them, but he called Giles to let him know what he had learned so far. Giles was good at doing the unflappable British thing - not quite as professionally as Wesley, but close - and yet he still had a thread of tension in his voice that betrayed his true feelings. It really came to the fore after Logan asked, "Could something of this Ascendant program survived?"

He was quiet for a long moment before he answered. "I thought the implication was they killed them all."

"Yeah, but if I know anything about secret monstrous experiments - and believe me, I know plenty - it's that sometimes something slips through the cracks. Could one of these Brotherhood people be one of 'em? An experiment that got away?"

Again, a long beat of silence. Giles wasn't comfortable talking about the sins of the Watchers. "It's ... not out of the realm of possibility, but we have no proof of that."

He snorted in dark humor. "We got no proof of anything. We're flyin' blind here."

"You can read the documents?" That question seemed to come out of left field.

"Yeah, I can."

"And what language is it?"

That was more of a stumper than it should have been. "It's a kind of old Cyrillic, but it's scrambled, in a way - a kind of basic coding system."

"You know a lot about basic coding systems?"

He didn't like his tone of voice. "Are you implyin' somethin'?"

"No, I'm just impressed. I had no idea you could read codes, that's all."

"I did work for the government. Well, some government at some point. And I was an interpreter." He hated how defensive that sounded, but there seemed to be no way around it.

"That's different than a cryptographer."

"Depends on what you're doin', I guess."

This seemed to be a dead avenue for discussion, so Giles moved on to what this could possibly all mean. He though he knew of a Watcher he could talk to, who might tell him something about this, but Giles couldn't promise anything; he wasn't exactly a beloved figure among the remaining Watchers. But he said he'd call back if he discovered anything of interest. He thought they shouldn't pursue this until they had more information, especially if Dru was involved. But Dru knew they were here, and knew what they were after - she'd come for them if they didn't take the battle to her. There was no way to keep out of the fight, and the best way to win it was to control it. And you controlled nothing when it was the enemy doing the sneak attack.

Besides, he'd been in some redneck bars in his time that were worse than any demon bar. How bad could it be?

* * *

It was only when he got the table broken over his head that Kier wondered exactly when everything went wrong.

Luckily Logan had already loosened the table (by being whacked with it, and that adamantium in him really did a good job of breaking other things, even when it wasn't in scary knife hand form), so while there was a sharp pain where it impacted with his skull, he was able to stumble away and shake off the ensuing dizziness. And when the huge Vetik demon lunged at him, he grabbed a stool and let the big clumsy demon - who was essentially a pile of muscles with stubby legs and a head shaped distressingly like a penis - impale himself on the legs, ramming the metal protrusions through his eyes and out the back of his skull with a sickening liquid noise. It then fell to the dusty bar floor twitching, and Kier had just enough time to duck as something large came flying towards him. He thought it was furniture, but the way it landed with a squelch indicated that no, it wasn't that, just another big piece of random demon that Logan had carved off violently in mid lunge.

They found the Oubliette, and fittingly it was in the basement of a building that had a butcher shop on the ground floor. (Perhaps that was foreshadowing of trouble.) To say it was a dive was an insult to dives everywhere - it was more like a sty. There were few lights, so it was like stepping into night itself, and the smell of the place made both him and Logan cringe. Too many hot, sweaty demon bodies in one place, too much blood and too much cheap beer, too much vomit, piss, excretions, and lingering fear of whatever had been on the menu these last couple of days. How could any sensitive nosed vampire stand to be down here? Maybe that's why there were few vampires in here.

The floor was dusty, and even had a few scales from demons that had molted in the place - did anyone ever clean up in here? There were a few scattered tables, but the highlight of the bar was a killing floor with a genuine altar and a moon shaped bar where a big, orange eyed Corvalgh demon worked as bartender. There were few beers and alcohols available; there was mostly a variety of bloods, including Human stocked by age and inclination.

There was no wood at all in the bar beyond the walls, a friendly gesture for the vampire clientele: the tables were plastic, the chairs and stools metal with padding of either cloth or leather. The seats weren't comfortable, but at least they weren't lethal weapons. (Well, to him.)

The problems probably started after the bartender asked why he didn't keep his Human on a leash. At first Kier thought it was a joke, maybe a reference to Logan's slightly wolfish appearance, but no, the guy was serious - they actually had leashes and other restraining devices hanging up behind the bar. As if this wasn't quite S&M enough, a demon came up and bit Logan's arm - and broke his teeth. He did break Logan's skin, though, and out of reflex Logan punched him in the face.

Yeah, that's when everything went to hell.

The demon patrons attacked them en masse, but most of them were addled by too much food or drugs, and their coordination and viciousness levels varied wildly. They pretty much dog piled on Logan - perhaps they figured the first one to get the kill would get the meal - but that was a mistake, which became evident the second he popped his claws, one set right through someone's gut. It then got messy and ugly - well, uglier.

The overflow demons attacked him, but he prepared for more once the demons realized that Logan, in spite of being Human, was the harder target. But Logan had lots of experience clearing a bar, or at least it seemed that way, as he went through all the demons like a humanoid threshing machine, cutting them in several different pieces and so quickly most didn't even realize what had happened. He saw one guy try to move after his leg had been cut off - he hadn't realized he lost it.

Nobody had any wooden weapons, so all the demons could do was hurt him, but some of them did punch pretty hard, and had really nasty claws. While he enjoyed his victory over the Vetik, he was tackled by a brick wall - or a Brussah demon, whichever. Felt pretty much the same.

Kier felt himself go flying, and he hit the rack of bottles behind the bar, all of it shattering beneath his back before he dropped to the floor, which was surprisingly lumpy.

Oh, no it wasn't - he'd landed on the bartender. Well, that was a lucky break, actually, as this was just the guy he wanted to torment.

He grabbed the Corvalgh and slammed his horned head against the concrete floor, snarling, "This'll stop as soon as you tell us where the Brotherhood of Vestus are."

"Who?" he replied, and Kier slammed his head down again.

Corvalghs were leather skinned demons who could almost pass for Human, as long as you didn't touch them, and as long as they wore a hat to cover the smattering of small yellow horns that were scattered across their bald pates. They were stubby, basically useless horns, not attractive or functional, and he wondered why these poor sods got the bad end of the genetic lottery.

He continued to smack the bastard around, but he continued to claim he had no idea what he was talking about, and the sounds of fighting and squelching were dying down rapidly, as Logan had pretty much cut through them all with little help from him. That kind of figured; Kier just assumed he'd be in his way.

He hauled the Corvalgh to his feet, and slammed his back against the bar. "You know damn well who the Brotherhood is - they were here with a freaky chick, hiring a bunch of Ressiks. Now where the fuck are they?"

The Corvalgh glared up at him like he was the stupidest thing he'd ever seen. "I already told you - I've got no fucking idea what you're talking about."

Logan slammed his claw right through the bartender's shoulder, making him scream in pain. He then twisted the claw, making it worse. "Talk, or lose the arm."

He was shockingly good at this torture stuff. Kier wondered belatedly if he should be nervous about that.

"Fine," the Corvalgh spat, tears running from his tangerine colored eyes. "I think I know who you mean, but I don't know where they are. That vamp chick with 'em is crazy, she started having some kind of conniption and killed a customer; I tossed them out. I don't know where they went after that."

He must have been telling the truth, because Logan yanked out his claws and the guy slipped to the floor behind the bar, making mewling noises and grabbing his shoulder. Kier hopped over the bar, and he and Logan asked the demons still living or conscious if they knew about the Brotherhood, but they came up with a big, bloody blank.

Which didn't make a lot of sense … unless the Brotherhood was that good, or everybody was so scared of them that they'd rather die than reveal where they were. And that wasn't a promising development.

* * *

What was it with vampires and runaways? You wouldn't think that was a natural combination, and yet somehow it was.

A rather large nest of vampires had sprung up near the downtown Greyhound station, so they were gearing up to put an end to it. It almost made Giles nostalgic, that's how old fashioned this was.

They'd gathered all their weapons and were about to leave when the phone on Bren's desk rang. Brendan all but dove for it, and Giles felt bad for him. He knew he was waiting for Kier to call, and he knew why he wasn't, but he also knew why he couldn't tell him. Bren probably would go after Kier, and that was a bad risk. He was sure Kier was trying, but two of him didn't even equal one Bren.

"Angel Investigations," Bren answered happily, and after listening for a moment, his face fell. He put the receiver on his shoulder, and said, "It's for you, Giles. Some grumpy British chick."

Normally that would be a rather broad category, but he'd been expecting this call. Angel looked at him and subtly raised an eyebrow. "Something important?"

He shook his head as he took the receiver from Bren. "Not really. I shouldn't be but a minute. I'll meet you downstairs."

Angel looked at him for a very long moment before nodding and opening the door, motioning Xander, Bren, and Naomi out ahead of him. Angel knew something was going on, but respected him enough not to ask. Yet. He expected him to corner him soon and ask him what was going on, but he still wasn't sure what he would tell him.

As soon as they were gone, he lifted the receiver off his shoulder. "That was quick."

"You're lucky I had nothing better to do today," Ruby snapped, sounding rather bitter about it. Of course that was typical for Ruby Von Allman, ex-Watcher, ex-MI5, current werewolf, and easily the techiest woman in Britain. He liked her very much, but she was brusque and generally unpleasant, and was that way long before she got bitten on the job. If anyone was born to be a werewolf, it was her, but he'd never tell her that, as she'd probably thump him. "Anna had to dig for it, but she found something." She then paused heavily.

Anna was the ghost of another former Watcher, one who kept and attended the secret library in London, full of Watcher history and lore. When HQ was destroyed, most of those records were destroyed with it, but there was always a back up. The Watchers weren't complete idiots. "Are you going to tell me?" he wondered.

"Are you going to be a rude bastard?"

He sighed. The important thing to remember was whenever you talked to Ruby was she was in control, even if you happened to be holding a gun on her. Some people were just like that. "Thank you very much for this, Ruby. Now, what did you find?"

She huffed an impatient breath, as if not completely satisfied with that, but let him have it. "A couple of decades after the Ascendant project was supposedly shut down, a Watcher in Russia found some evidence that one of the subjects may have survived and had descendants."

That was a development that wasn't that surprising, but was still a bit alarming. "Is there any proof that one of them may have been turned into a vampire?"

"As of now, no, but Anna's still looking. But what she found seems to indicate that the Watchers were very alarmed, because the survivor seemed to be showing some … traits."

"Traits of what?"

"That's just the thing. We haven't discovered what precisely, there's just some vague notes that they were more than Human."

That was a very troubling development. If they were more than Human to start with, and then became a vampire … what kind of monster could they be dealing with now?

* * *

They got back to the hotel, bloody, sore, and depressed - sounded like a normal Saturday night for the both of them - and Rags was still snoring away, looking like the sane one of their sad trio. And how sad did they have to be for that to be true?

Logan went to take a shower to wash the blood off him, while Kier was left to contemplate whether he should try and call Bren yet. What did he say? It wasn't that he wasn't good with bullshit - he was an actor, for Bob's sake; he was _great_ at bullshitting - but he felt like a failure on several fronts right now, and he didn't know how long he could cover that. Bren usually knew when he was down, even if he tried to cover it. Shouldn't he be accustomed to failure? How many roles had he been rejected for in his brief lifetime? He should be able to take this like it was nothing. But Kayla was in danger, probably because of him (somehow - he still hadn't figured out why), and it really bothered him, even though it shouldn't have. What good was being a vampire if you weren't immune to feelings of guilt?

He was sitting on the end of the bed, listening to Rags snore, when his cell phone rang. Was it Bren, calling him and asking why the hell he hadn't called him yet? Oh dear, he hated calls like this. He'd never been very good at relationships; he was much better at one night stands and bouts of sex that never led to anything more than an occasional booty call.

Okay, so he was a slut. Again, actor - what did they expect?

He went out in the hall, because over Rags' snoring and the roar of the shower he was pretty sure he'd never hear the person on the other end of the line. Only then did he answer his cell, glad the corridor was empty.

It wasn't Bren on the phone; in fact, he almost didn't recognize the voice at all, except it sounded like the voice on the film. "Can you talk, Kieran?"

Fear stabbed through him. "How the hell did you get my number?"

"How do you think?" the long haired vampire from the sex club massacre replied icily. "Kayla has your number, does she not?"

"What have you done to her, you son of a bitch?" He hissed, so suddenly angry it was hard not to morph into vamp face. "What do you want from us?"

"Now now, I have a compromise that should be amenable to all of us. Are you listening carefully?"

He wished he could reach through the phone and yank this fucker's head off. "What?"

"An exchange. In three hours, you should lead your motley crew to High Park. I trust you know where that is?"

"Of course I do." It was a major Toronto attraction. Also, like many big parks in major cities, there was a part of it where, at night, men loitered for quick and anonymous sex with each other. Not that he ever did that, mind you. (Well, not in Toronto.) It usually attracted vampires looking for an easy meal too, but he didn't know about that part of it until he actually was a vampire.

"Come to Grenadier Pond. Once there, we'll exchange Kayla for your friends. You two will be allowed to leave, but only if you do so at that moment. If you warn your friends, if you try and help them, you'll all be killed. Do you understand?"

"What?" What sense did that make? Logan and Rags for his sister? "No, I don't. Why do you want them? Why did you take Kayla in the first place? What the fuck did I ever do to you?"

There was a long moment of silence before he answered with a surprising amount of venom in his voice. "This is not a discussion. We know where you are, and if we wanted to kill you now, we could do it. I'm giving you a chance to collect your pretty little sister and save your own scrawny neck. Shall I just assume you'd rather we firebomb your hotel?"

That was probably just exaggeration - but considering what they'd done at the sex club, maybe not. Could he take that chance? "No, of course not."

"Then we have a deal?"

Oh shit. The wrong answer could mean death to Kayla and a whole lot of other people. Then again, so could the right answer. Was there any way to win here? He didn't know; he was so far in over his head he felt like he was drowning. He was a silly, inconsequential man who'd led a silly, inconsequential life, and now he was thrust into a kind of afterlife that was too serious and too substantial for a vain, shallow person such as himself. He went into his vampire life with nothing but a laundry list of regrets, and the hurt of it just never stopped. "Yes."

"Three hours. Don't be late." He then heard a click and the empty drone of a dial tone.

He hung up his cell and dropped it back in his coat pocket, leaning against the wall and sinking down to the saffron colored carpet. What the fuck was he going to do? Did he risk telling Logan and Rags about this? Or would they really know? Was Kayla already dead and they were just toying with him? Would he backstab some more friends, only to discover he'd done nothing but make them hate him before they all died?

He'd have given anything just to know what the right thing to do was at this moment. But he just didn't know.


	7. Chapter 7

6

Kier decided to walk around for a bit, and left a note for Logan that he thought he might be able to get some more substantial information from another contact who wasn't so Human friendly. He had no idea if he'd buy that or not, but he hoped so, as it would give him time to think.

He ended up in a nearby bar, more trendy and clean than the ones Logan frequented, which you could tell by the number of mojitos and various -tinis being served. He ordered a mojito he just looked at, and ended up talking to a nice looking Asian guy in a reasonably expensive suit who smelled like Calvin Klein. He wasn't sure if he was gay or just friendly - there was no obvious flirting - but he found himself eying his neck; he could see the faint thrum of his pulse. And he wondered if he could pull him away and have a quick bite. He wouldn't take it all, he was just a bit peckish because he was a nervous eater.

No, no, no. He was supposedly a good guy now, and taking blood at the bite club was different than just picking someone and biting them. People at the bite club volunteered to get bitten; they knew what they were getting into. It was a mutual act as opposed to one forced on some random stranger. And no matter how hungry he felt, he knew he wasn't starving - he'd eaten before they came to Canada. His nerves were just starting to fray, that's all. He still had no idea how he was supposed to handle this.

He got back to the hotel to find Rags up and visibly groggy, but sitting up and eating a sandwich, as well as having the hair of the dog that bit him (a bottle of beer). Logan was also out of the shower but still damp, wearing a tight black t-shirt so new he could still see the creases in it where it was folded up in the package, although his scruffy jeans were still the same. (At least the demon blood splatters had dried and looked like they could have been paint.) Apparently while he was gone a video iPod was delivered specifically for Kier, although Logan said the bellboy who brought it said the man who brought it didn't leave his name. Logan assumed it was from the Brotherhood of Vestus, and Kier guessed he was right.

He hadn't watched it yet, as Kier had just beat its delivery by ten minutes. Logan sat on the edge of the bed, and he and Rags both scooted by him to have a look at what was on the tiny screen. It looked like a horror film set, a sort of grim nightclub, with several bodies scattered all over the floor amongst overturned furniture. It looked familiar to Kier, but his gut recognized it before his mind - it roiled and burned like it technically couldn't do since he was dead. But then he saw himself on the small screen, a desperate would be victim pulling planks and overturned tables off the door that had been barricaded to keep the monsters out, unaware that they were actually locking themselves in with it. "Turn it off," Kier said, looking away. He felt tears burn in his eyes, and he wasn't sure if it was due to anger, sadness, revulsion, or all of it.

"That's you, inn't?" Rags commented.

Logan understood what it was, though, which was a credit to him. "This is it, isn't it?"

Kier nodded, and could still hear the audio, and didn't need to, as the script was burned into his brain. _BRIAN recoils in horror as the door is thrown open from the outside and MONIQUE enters, her face transformed into that of a vampire. Brian backs away, stunned and disbelieving._

_Brian_

_No. (Beat) Not you. _

_Monique smiles, but it only shows off her fangs._

_Monique_

_Yes, me. It's always been me, you silly little boy._

_Brian is unaware of KURT and JULIO coming up behind him, and starts when they grab his arms from behind. Brian struggles, but can't pull away. Monique comes up to him and grabs his face, and as soon as she does, Kurt and Julio release him. Brian is transfixed by Monique and can't move._

_Monique_

_And now I finally get to have a little fun. _

_Monique bites Brian's throat, drinking his blood._

Of course it was when "Monique" actually bit him and started drinking his blood that he realized it wasn't any normal horror movie - it was a snuff film. And, oh yeah, vampires apparently did exist. Who knew?

Logan shut it off, and Rags complained, "Oi! I was watchin' that! So what 'appens? I dinn't realize you were actually an actor, mate. I mean, Bren told me, but I ain't ever seen you in anyfing. No offense."

Kier scrubbed the tears out of his eyes, turned away from the both of them in the hopes they didn't notice. "It's not a real movie. I thought it was at the time, but I was wrong."

"It's the snuff film he was killed in," Logan said, standing up. He dropped the iPod on the carpet and stamped on it, shattering it into a million pieces.

"Oi, are you fuckin' nuts?!" Rags shouted, clearly startled. "You know 'ow expensive dose are?"

"I don't care," Logan snapped, sounding surprisingly angry. "They probably pulled it off one of their victims. The whole point of it was to shake up Kieran."

Rags was quiet for a moment, clearly thinking that over. "I don' get it. Ya made a 'orror film while a vampire?"

Logan sighed irritably. "No. He was hired for a vampire film that was apparently made up of actual vampires. They killed him and changed him on screen so other vamps could whack off, or whatever the fuck they get outta crap like this."

Although he still felt sick with rage and self-pity, Kier realized that Logan was being protective of him, and he wasn't sure why, but he was touched. "I guess Bren didn't tell you that, huh?"

"Naw, I guess not." He scratched his head, and when Kier looked back at him, he blinked his crystal eyes in what seemed to be confusion. It was hard to read eyes made of minerals, but he'd been around Rags long enough that he kind of could.

Logan paced restlessly, stopping to retrieve his own beer bottle from the top of the room's television set. "No one's last minutes should be recorded." He said that like he knew how rough that was.

Holy shit, _did _he? Supposedly he'd died before, right? Had he ever been filmed? Creepy.

He told them his story, and a course of action was decided upon. Rags got this weird idea for a spell that might help them, although it wasn't clear how. This required them to get going early so they could stop at a drugstore and get Rags what he needed to do it. And how weird was it to be in a Toronto drugstore at near two in the morning, buying lipstick and Kohl eyeliner pencils with two other men, one of whom had impressive musculature and sideburns and the other with a flabby gut and wearing sunglasses indoors? The teller looked at them like they were all freaks, and that just seemed appropriate.

They ducked into the men's room and Rags took off his shirt. He drew most of the symbols on his front, but couldn't get the ones on his back or arms, so he and Logan had to do those (and were they thrilled about that). Actually, Kier didn't do it for long, as some symbols he couldn't draw on Rags because they were harmful to vampires or something. So he got to sit on the sink and watch Logan, who grumbled all the way, muttering, "This better work." Rags seemed slightly offended - or maybe it was just the kohl pencil hurt - but Logan had a point. Rags's first spell didn't exactly work to plan. But he was sober now (relatively), so perhaps this one had more of a chance of working.

When they were done, Rags put his shirt back on carefully, trying not to smudge the symbols, and Logan and Rags bought a couple of beers before they left the drugstore, weathering even stranger looks from the clerk, who suddenly seemed to realize that the three of them had been in their men's room for about an hour. The guy was clearly thinking some weird gay sex thing had just occurred in the gent's, and Kier was tempted to lean over and tell him, "I wouldn't fuck Rags if he was the last man on Earth. He's a nice guy and all, but … no." Yet he didn't think that would help somehow. Also, Logan might realize that Kier would happily fuck him, and that could screw up the relationship dynamic.

Logan knew where High Park was - of course - and since it was such a long walk, they had Rags teleport them all there, but just outside it, so Logan could do a little reconnaissance. But why he didn't know, as Kier warned him there might be guys at the park that had nothing to do with this, and Logan surprised him by telling him he knew. "The guys trolling for sex. Yeah, I know all about it," he said, before disappearing quietly into the dark. Kier wanted to ask him how he knew that exactly, but figured he was just really old and had seen just about everything. He was probably incredibly hard to shock … which may have explained his hair.

He and Rags headed into the park, towards Grenadier Pond, and he was vaguely aware that they were being followed. Trees lined the park, tall and full, casting shadows in spite of the dim lights, and he could smell the people as well as the vampires around, and if he could, certainly Logan could. Even though the storm had cleared off, leaving a cool night in its wake, a strong breeze came up occasionally, as cold and sharp as a knife. Between the trees he saw the surface of the water ripple and shimmer like a gauze curtain, and Logan joined up with them, whispering, "They're all over the place, but I don't know how many are Brotherhood or just lazy vamps looking for a quick bite."

"I guess we'll find out," Kier whispered back, his stomach twisting into an anxious knot. He wasn't sure he could do this, but he had no choice now. He was committed.

Logan paused at the tree break, looking down towards the water warily, and there was this small noise, a kind of whispering hiss, and something hit Logan in the neck. He pulled it out and looked at it - it was a tiny dart - and had time to shoot an evil glare into the trees before collapsing to the dirt, as boneless as a rag doll, the dart bouncing out of his fingers. The vampires seemed to materialize out of the night, led by that long haired vampire he'd seen before. "That's the toxin of a Rizuor demon," the hesher vamp explained. "A neurotoxin as paralyzing as it is deadly, and we bet he hasn't been exposed to it before. We gave him a lethal dose four times over. That should keep him down for … what? About an hour? That's kind of a handy ability to have."

"Where is Kayla?" he demanded. "I brought them here like you asked."

"Oi, what d'ya mean ya brought us 'ere?" Rags demanded.

A big blond vampire who could have been a body double for Dolph Lundgren back in the '80's crouched down next to Logan, and exclaimed, "Son of a bitch! Canadian Special Forces!"

The metalhead vamp scowled and looked back at Dolph. (Did Dolph have a Russian accent?) "What?"

"This guy, he's Canadian Special Forces! Or he was. He's the crazy Canadian the Allies sent to Stalingrad during the siege. Some of the brass wanted to try and work something out with the Allies, supplies and such, so the Allies said they'd send someone. We didn't think they could get anyone through - I mean, it was war, a Russian winter. The guy'd have to get past German lines and survive the cold too, but they said the Canadians had someone who could do it. This was him. He spoke fluent Russian too, with a slight Siberian accent. We called him the Wolf. He could drink us all under the table." He smirked in reminiscence. "You shoulda seen the things this guy could do with a knife. He once threw one from three hundred yards and nailed a guy right in the eye."

The hesher was unimpressed. "He's a Human. It can't be the same guy."

"He's a mutant, an old one" Kier pointed out. If the Russian vampire actually knew Logan way back when, would that stop him from hurting him? "It probably was him. He can still do amazing things with knives." A glance around confirmed about a dozen vampires surrounding them on all sides, and none of them close enough to grab.

The long haired vampire gave him an evil look, possibly for encouraging Dolph to look at Logan as something other than meat. He then looked past him, over his shoulder. "You can walk, Persaid. We got no use for you."

"I ain't goin' anywhere wifout Logan," he replied icily.

"Where is Kayla?" Kier interjected, his anger rising.

The long haired vampire's eyes were as clear and cold as an arctic tundra. "Did you really think we trusted you? We factored betrayal into the equation. We'll bring you to Kayla - we don't bring her to you."

Like a dream - or a nightmare - Drusilla drifted out of the woods, her skin so pale it was luminous in the dark, her hair a clinging shadow, her lips too red and her eyes too bright and too empty. She was so skinny she hardly seemed to inhabit the empire waist burgundy velvet dress that she was wearing. She probably would have been pretty if she didn't look completely barking mad. "Ooh, you're pretty," she said, and it took a moment for Kier to realize she was talking to him. "You're like a doll full of flowers and tears." She then leaned forward, and stage whispered, "But you've got a secret, don't you? A surprise inside." Her gaze scudded down to Logan on the ground, and her smile grew, becoming hungry and predatory. "His blood still tickles. Even black, it's red."

Bren had not described her madness with enough detail. It wasn't that her brain was broken more than it was simply puree; he had no idea how it wasn't leaking out her ears. Perhaps she shoved corks in them.

Rags stepped forward, and snapped, "Leave 'im alone, bint."

She glanced at Rags with something like disinterest, but suddenly her eyes widened and her mouth formed a little O of horror. "He's not right!" she exclaimed, backing up a couple of steps. "He burns!"

Great - confirmation that the spell was working.

The long haired vampire rolled his eyes. "What is it now, Dru?"

"He's the sun. Send him away!"

"The sun," he repeated in a weary whisper, rubbing his eyes. Clearly he was tired of Dru and her insanity, and he almost sympathized with him. "Boys, get him out of here."

Two thick necked vampires advanced on Rags, who took off his shirt, revealing the marks in red and black all over his torso. They grabbed his arms, and suddenly let go of him, recoiling in pain and horror as their hands smoked like smoldering fires. "I am the 'igh priest of the Stone Temple," Rags proclaimed in a surprisingly authoritarian voice. "And you parasites cannot man'andle me."

That was the spell and the symbols marked on his skin: he was consecrated. His skin was essentially the solidified version of holy water, which is why Kier could only help draw the symbols on him in the beginning, marks and sigils sacred to the Gorgons. This put him directly under their protection, essentially a holy artifact, and any vampire who grabbed him long enough would burst into flame.

The long haired vampire stared at him in disbelief, but then turned that look on Dru, who was cringing back against a lodgepole pine like Rags really was glowing. (He wasn't, but who knew how Dru saw things?) "Why didn't you tell us he was a priest?"

"She can't see me," Rags said, walking towards them. All the vampires backed up, even Kier as Rags walked past, because he felt like heat. And the weird thing about that was that once you were a vampire, your sense of hot and cold pretty much disappeared. "I'm a Persaid demon, 'member?"

Persaids were basically negative energy sponges, demons who could absorb the ambient bad feelings around them before they could explode into something terrible (generally - not always), but this uncontrollable and fairly odd ability made them impervious to all psychic powers. Telepaths couldn't read them, seers couldn't see them - they were big blanks, the psychic equivalent of black holes: energy could go in, but it couldn't come out. As demons went they were considered harmless, but that didn't mean they didn't have their uses, especially as secret weapons.

"Where's Kayla?" Kier demanded one more time, as Rags advanced on the long haired vampire. He was wisely backing up. "What do you want with her and me?"

"This is your plan?" the vamp chided, although he never took his eyes off Rags. "Depending on a Persaid to save your ass? That's pretty lame."

The two vamps who had tried to grab Rags grabbed him, big guys who must have been weightlifters, and Kier let them hold him. He could break out of this, but he wasn't ready to just yet. "Get him out of here," the hesher shouted, and to Kier's surprise, they started dragging him backwards into the woods. What the hell was this?

Before Rags could turn or he could yank an arm free, a muffled shot rang out, and blood splattered on the side of his face as the vamp holding his left arm had part of his head explode, and he toppled over like a bowling pin. "Sorry I'm late," Marcus said, coming out of the woods aiming a rather large and nasty looking high powered sniper rifle. "Met a really cute guy by the fountain." Shouldering the rifle, he picked off the other vampire holding his arm. "Know it won't kill 'em, but goddamn, a shot to the head's gonna take a long time to heal."

"Finally," Logan snapped, jumping up to his feet and making Dru let out a squeal of fear. "I think I swallowed some dirt." He turned his head and spit, and as he did, he popped the claws on his left hand, making both Dolph and the metalhead jump back half a foot.

"And how is that my fault?" Marc wondered. He'd picked off two more vampires before the rest wisely slunk into the shadows. But Marc was still picking them off, because he saw in infrared, and the vamps appeared, according to him, as "dead blue spots".

Back at the hotel, Logan had called Marc to see if he could help. He wanted to come up, but he was in Baltimore and didn't know if he could make it up there in time - in case he couldn't, he had a friend in Toronto he could call. But Marcus called Helga, and Hel knew a wizard in the area who owed her (or Bob - that wasn't clear) a favor, and he was able to teleport Marc up to the city. Marc had called Logan while they were still at the drugstore, and said he'd meet them in the park. It was his idea to shoot the vampires in the head, and save the wood for when the numbers had dwindled.

Of course he'd told Rags and Logan about the phone call. After Logan was so protective of him, how could he lie to him? Also, there was the little matter that Logan knew he was lying when he actually attempted to do so. Lying to Logan was a difficult proposition at the best of times.

The long haired vampire gaped at Logan in abject horror. "How in the fuck are you immune to Rizuor venom?"

Logan lifted his shirt, and showed the mark Rags had drawn on Logan's stomach before they left the bathroom. (Rags even remarked on how his stomach was hard enough to make an excellent drawing surface. This made Kier turn and bite his fist, a gesture he didn't think anyone in real life ever did. But it was either that or whimper.) It looked like a circular tangle of curvy snakes drawn in kohl, in direct center between his belly button and the bottom of his ribcage. "It's a ward that prevents poisoning, or some shit like that," Logan explained with a shrug. "A Gorgon thing. Fuck if I know; I wasn't even sure it would work."

"I told ya it would," Rags replied, somewhat defensively.

Marc had picked off all the vampires save for Dru, Dolph, and the hesher. Some of the ones he'd shot in the head were moaning on the ground and moving, but they were still so hurt and befuddled that they wouldn't be in fighting shape anytime soon. The four of them advanced on the vampire trio, Marc slinging his rifle over his back and pulling out a stake instead. He was wearing all black - pants, shirt, boots, coat, and watch cap - so he looked like a ninja, an assassin, or both.

"Did you really think _this_ would work?" Logan asked the long haired guy. "Do you know how often we've been set up, individually and as a group? Did you _really _think you could get the drop on us? Especially with only a dozen vamps? Seriously, that's fuckin' pathetic. I was prepared for at least two dozen of you."

"It is disappointing," Marc agreed. "I got enough ammo with me to retake the Alamo. I mean right this second, and you know how gun happy they are in Texas."

Logan reached out and grabbed the long haired guy by his throat, bringing his sprung claws right up to his eyeballs. "Now you're gonna take us to Kayla, and she'd better be alive and unvamped, or you won't live long enough to regret it. Got it?"

He looked like he wanted to argue, but he knew he had no chance here at all, and nodded tightly, giving Logan an evil scowl.

Dolph continued looking at Logan with something akin to wonder. "Fuck, it is you. I recognize your voice."

Logan shrugged. "Maybe. I don't remember that far back. You weren't a vamp in Stalingrad, were you?"

"No, I was a sniper. I didn't get vamped until after the war."

He just nodded, not sure what to say to that. Sorry?

Kier cleared his throat, and as soon as he had their attention, pulled out the stake he had carried, hidden beneath his shirt and tucked into the back of his jeans. He raised it into striking position. "We both know I'm not going to kill you until I get Kayla back, but you know what?" He plunged the stake into the metalhead's shoulder, making him scream in pain. "I can put a whole bunch of holes in you. So you tell me now what the fuck you want with me, or I'm gonna perforate you so badly we'll all find out if it's possible for a vampire to bleed to death. Now talk."

He glared at him in molten hatred for a good long moment, and then he said something that made no sense at all. "We thought it was her we wanted, but it's you, you misbegotten abortion of a vampire. You weren't supposed to be this; you were supposed to be the one."

Kier exchanged glances with Logan, Marc, and Rags, and none of them looked like they had any idea what the fuck the guy was talking about. So he asked what he knew they were all thinking.

"Huh?"


	8. Chapter 8

7

How wearying was it to be followed? It got old so very fast.

Of course this was London, and the streets were so crowded it seemed a bit arrogant to just assume one of the milling, maddening crowd had singled you out. But Ruby had been a Watcher, a government operative, and a werewolf for some time now, and she had honed her instincts to razor sharpness. If she thought she was being followed, she was, and there wasn't any doubt about it. The problem was there were so many people who might like to do so that it was difficult to narrow down the suspect list, although the fact that it was daytime pretty much eliminated vampires from the equation.

She ducked down the first alley she came to, and waited, leaning against the brick building on her right, tapping her foot in impatience as the minutes began to drag.

Finally, a familiar man tried to turn down the alley, and stopped short upon seeing her, eyes wide in shock. "Ruby," he exclaimed breathlessly. He was a squat, stout man, dressed in tweed, and normally would have looked somewhat natty, except on a day as overcast and humid as this, she thought he looked slightly damp and uncomfortable, as if the fabric was slowly and inexorably strangling him. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking on her part. "Fancy meeting you here."

She narrowed her eyes at him, not bothering to hide her disgust. "I know you were following me, Howard. You weren't exactly made for reconnaissance. So what does the Watcher's Council want with me?"

He feigned surprise, but he wasn't very good at it. "I have no idea -"

"Give it a rest, or I'll knee you in the bollocks."

His perfectly round face flushed deep crimson. It was a combination of her cursing, and her being deadly serious about it. His thinning grayish brown hair gave him a very prominent forehead, and made his small, far spaced eyes disappear into the shadows beneath his brows. Always an unattractive specimen, Howard Broom went to Eton and was proud of it, which made him all the more repulsive. Although the Council was now in Sydney, and he always disparaged the Australians as "the thin version of Americans", he went where the authority was, and worked for them now. But they never did send him a ticket to Never-Never, so she assumed they took him on out of pity. After swallowing hard - she watched his Adam's Apple bob up and down like a cork in a drain - he decided to actually tell her the truth. "They - there's some concern that you've been in contact with Rupert Giles."

"Is he persona non grata now?"

"What do you mean _now_? He has been since he was fired for dereliction of duty."

"Don't be tedious. Why does the Council think it's in their best interest to bother me?"

He cleared his throat, tugged at his collar nervously. What was wrong with men nowadays? They all seemed to wilt in front of her like disturbed hothouse flowers. Were they that terrified of strong women? "It's … uh, we believe he's been looking into … restricted areas of inquiry. He will need help, and you were deemed the most likely candidate."

"Out of an entire shocking field of what, about six? With geniuses like you at the Council, I have no idea why the demons are about to overrun the Earth."

"You like being an obstinate cow, don't you?" Another voice said from behind her. She glanced over her shoulder, not about to show surprise that she had been flanked, yet she was surprised to see Velasquez, wearing all black, like a casual undertaker. He held one hand up in front of himself like a gay toreador, but she knew he was just focusing energy. He was one of the Council's combat spellcasters, which only made her feel marginally better - he didn't sneak up on her, he probably just appeared. "You can tell us how much he's told you and what he's uncovered, or we can pull it out of you."

She scoffed, crossing her arms over her chest. This allowed her to subtly reach for the gun she wore in a shoulder holster beneath her left arm. It was often incredibly uncomfortable, but it did have its moments. "So now the Council attacks its own. Bloody unbelievable. It's all been downhill since Phan was ousted."

"Like attacking your own is a new thing!" A voice exclaimed incredulously, but it didn't belong to either Velasquez or Broom. In fact, the two men appeared to be frozen in place, and a new man appeared behind Velasquez, as if he'd always been there. It was Meldane - or Mordred, whichever - dressed in Armani and a long black duster, his hair now shoulder length and the colour of almonds. He wore sleek sunglasses with sky blue lenses, making her wonder if that was a French thing, or just a pretentious thing. He was smoking a stinky Galois, which made her nose instinctively wrinkle. "You Watchers always made a good sport out of it."

"What the hell are you doing here?"

He scoffed. "That's gratitude for you."

"I didn't need your help."

Although his look was doubtful behind his azure lenses, he glanced at Velasquez, frozen in a moment of gathering hostility, and seemed to study him like he was a fascinating new insect he'd just discovered in his sandwich. "This is what passes for a combat magician, huh? Well, yeah, maybe you didn't." He ground out his Galois on Velasquez's forehead. The skin sizzled and burned, but there was no reaction from Velasquez; he wouldn't feel it until Mordred unfroze him. But then it'd really hurt. "They really need some lessons on spell combat. Too bad I'm not inclined to give them any."

"Why are you even here? Why aren't you in France … doing whatever the bloody hell it is you do there?"

He shrugged. "I'm hiding out from Bob. He has a really scary ex-wife, and I have no idea if she's finished with me yet or not, but I'd rather not find out. And I'll have you know I protect France; I've kept major demonic incursions from occurring within its borders for the past forty three years. Can you Watchers say the same thing about your precious England?"

Deciding to take advantage of the moment, Ruby started searching the frozen Broom's pockets, just to see if he had anything interesting. "It used to be your precious England too."

"That was before you people classified me as a threat. What nonsense is that?"

"You scared a lot of people, Meldane … Mordred. Whatever your name is. You're tied into elemental magic, which is a devastating force at the best of times, and, oh yeah, you were an evil wanker there for a bit, weren't you?"

"I learned my lesson. Besides, I wasn't evil, just … misunderstood."

It was her turn to scoff. "Fuck you and the horse that gave birth to you."

"It wasn't a horse!" He protested indignantly.

Broom's pockets turned up nothing of note, except he seemed to have an addiction to Tums. "But you haven't really explained why you're here now. Are you following me, you sick little man?"

That made him laugh. "You wish, you dried up spinster. No, I was attracted to the scent of so many Watchers in one place. I felt like being an asshole. I had no idea you were amongst them, though. So why are they after you? Who did you piss off this time?"

"It's not me, it's Rupert. He discovered an old Watcher project called Ascendant, and it seems the Council would rather no outsiders know about it."

"Why? What's it do?"

She sighed, and studied him for a moment. A Eurotrash embodiment of magic - how sad was the world when that's what they were left with? But there was no denying - as much as she wanted to - that he could be a big help. If the Council was determined to send a combat spellcaster after her, Mordred could neuter them completely before they even got into range. He was magic, after all, and if he didn't want them to have any, they wouldn't. He was a twat, but he could serve a purpose. "It seems the Council, way back when, decided to try and make their own Human/demon hybrids to supplement Slayers, trying to impart demon essences into people without turning them demon."

Mordred shook his head, and started searching his pockets for another Galois. "That'd never work."

"You'd think not, but here's the thing: one did work. The Watchers killed off all the survivors of the experiment - of which there were few, and they all seemed to fall along the lines of mercy killings anyways - save for one, who got away from them and apparently had children who carried the ability in a more refined state. They changed their names, fled to Europe, and then escaped to the new colonies, where the Watchers officially lost them. But it was assumed, being more than Human, they'd show themselves eventually."

Mordred looked intrigued by the story. "But they didn't, did they?"

"No. I just got back from the secret library, where Anna found the humorous side of this. There's a vampire cult that believes there will be one perfect vessel for their lost vampire king - don't ask - and it seems the perfect vessel is the Ascendant."

He smirked and shook his head. "They created their own problem? Brilliant. See why I love you Watchers?"

"It gets better. The Ascendant exists, and there's every reason to believe that the cult has found him."

He chuckled, but it seemed rather smug. "Terrific. And rather than hunt him down, they're going after people who know about their blunder? Bravo. I should drop them a line and express my gratitude for such wonderful entertainment."

She grabbed him by the arm and dragged him out onto the street, taking him with her. Yes, she hated to be in his Galois reeking company longer than necessary, but he was a perfect non-Human shield at this point. "Come on, we have to warn Rupert."

"_We_? Since when am I helping you lot out?"

"Since, if you don't, I'll tell Bob where to find you."

He glowered evilly at her, and she could finally see the dark swirl of power in his inky irises beneath the lenses. "That is so not fair," he said, but gave in with a pout.

Men. They were so easy to manipulate.

* * *

The long haired vampire glared at them all like they were idiots, "You really have no idea, do you?" He asked. He was staring straight at Kier, so clearly the question was meant for him.

Kier glared right back, and tried to look as pissed off as possible. He hated feeling like an idiot, but he couldn't help it now. At least he wasn't alone. "About what you're saying? No. I'm not even sure you're speaking English."

The long haired vamp laughed, but it was humorless and disdainful. "God, you're an idiot."

Kier raised the stake menacingly. "You don't insult the guy holding the weapon, moron."

He shook his head, sneering at him. "Wasted - all wasted! You're the moron. How the hell can you be it? Pathetic."

Logan shook him, just in case he forgot who was holding the claws in his face. "Start making sense or I'm gonna start carving initials into you."

"Ooh, carve Kevin Federline's initials into his face," Marc said cheerfully.

Logan glared at him. "Why the hell would I do that?"

"'Cause he's a dick too."

Logan processed this, then shrugged in reluctant agreement. Rags looked between Marc and Logan in a way that said, loud and clear, _"Have you both taken your meds, or shall I run off and get them for you?" _

Dolph swallowed hard, and said, "You know we're the Brotherhood of Vestus, yeah?"

"Yeah, Sparky, we got that part," Logan snapped impatiently.

"So you know we've been searching for a vessel for Vestus, our disembodied leader, the greatest vampire that ever existed? The vessel is the Ascendant, and the oracle pointed us to the Davidoviches as the location of our vessel."

"Who are the Davidoviches?" Marc wondered.

"That's my last name," Kier replied, suddenly having a bad feeling about this. "My real last name, at any rate." The last name the agent advised him to shorten to the "less ethnic" name of David, which was his stage name, but he'd never legally changed it. A cold shock of fear ran through him. "My parents! Holy fuck! Did you - "

"They're fine," Dolph insisted. "We had no need to bother them. It was you or Kayla, and after a while it became obvious it couldn't be her. But then we found out that you were already a vampire, and that … that's a problem."

"Whoa, wait, are there cliff notes?" Marc said. "'Cause I'm pretty sure I'm missing some stuff here."

"I think we all are," Logan replied. "So he's the vessel of your vampire king, whatever … and he's got the wrong vampire in him?"

Dolph shrugged uncomfortably. "Basically."

"Hold the fucking phone," Kier snapped. "How the hell am I a vessel?"

The hesher vamp continued to eye him with contempt. "You never realized you were different?"

Kier almost laughed, but couldn't quite manage it. "I was the only out gay boy in my entire high school. I've felt different all my life, jackass."

The long haired vampire's eyes went wide with horror. "You're _gay_?"

Marc crowded closer in a menacing way, and only then did Kier notice he had one of his gloves off. None of the vampires probably knew what a threat that was, and wouldn't until he grabbed them and dug in his fingernails. "You got a problem with that, ass clown?"

The vamp stared at him, and he seemed to understand that if he said he did have a problem with it, Marc would make him very sorry for it. Perhaps he remembered his comment about meeting a cute guy by the fountain, and also remembered he'd just shot all of his followers in the head with the high powered rifle he still wore on his back. You had to be a special kind of stupid to piss off Marc. There were times and places to piss off gay guys, but this was obviously not one of them, not unless you were a masochist with a death wish. And while Kier was sure this vamp was a sadist, he apparently didn't like getting pain inflicted on himself; he preferred dishing it out. "No, it's just … unexpected."

"Is this why he's different from most vamps?" Logan asked, pulling the topic back to the most important point. "Because he's the Ascendant?"

The long haired vamp flashed Logan a look that was a few degrees shy of grateful. "Of course. He was made to be a vampire."

"Say what?" Kier wondered if this was what Alice felt like when she fell down the rabbit hole. Okay, she'd been a fictional person, but that wasn't really the point.

The hesher looked him square in the eye, and he found his sudden intensity unsettling. "You were bred to be a vampire, idiot. We just didn't expect that you'd be grabbed by some slut who didn't know perfection when she saw it."

Okay, yeah, this wasn't making any sense at all. "How do you breed a Human to be a vampire?"

But after he asked the question, he wondered if he really wanted to know.

* * *

Taking out the nest of vampires was much easier than even Giles thought. So easy, in fact, he almost wondered if it was a set up.

They were in and out in five minutes. Even Xander got a couple of dustings in, but the entire nest seemed a little logy from having fed so well recently. Apparently a new busload of kids from Iowa had just come in a few hours earlier, and the vamps had gorged themselves like gluttons. He was sorry they hadn't arrived earlier.

He wasn't the only one slightly unnerved by this development. Angel seemed unusually broody on their way back, and finally asked him, "Do you think that Wolfram and Hart is still toying with us?"

Giles considered that carefully. You'd have hoped they'd learned their lesson and backed off, but they didn't seem to learn anything ever. But that was the thing about evil groups - they wouldn't be evil if they knew when to quit; in that case, they'd just be annoying. Finally, he said, "I'm sure they're not done with us, but I don't think this is their style."

"Yeah, they're more orange leisure suits," Xander offered, his axe hefted to his shoulder as casually as a baseball bat. When they all stared at him, he explained, "Loud, garish. You know, obvious. I can't believe you guys didn't get that."

"I think it's you we don't get," Bren replied.

"Nobody gets me; I'm the wind, baby."

"That's a Mystery Science Theater 3000 quote!" Naomi exclaimed . "Did you steal that leisure suit line too?"

"I didn't steal anything!" he protested. "It's called making a pop culture reference. Jeeze, Dyna-Girl, get with the times. Hey, has the internet reached Canada yet?"

"Can we please get back to the important subject?" Angel asked, a peevish tone in his voice. He hadn't really learned to tolerate Xander's outbursts any more than he had back in Sunnydale, but Giles felt he had no room to criticize, as he hadn't exactly grown more tolerant either. He was an adult now, he assumed he'd have grown out of that, but no, Xander was apparently going to be like this for the rest of his life. Which was a deeply frightening thought. Angel looked at him, but he was more serious than annoyed. "Nothing is beneath or above Wolfram and Hart. They'll do what they have to do to get to us."

Giles nodded reluctantly, "Still, as a nest, they were poorly organized at best. I'd have expected something more impressive in the way of opposition."

Xander, who was leading the way back to the office, suddenly stopped, and Bren almost ran into his back. "Hey, what's the deal?"

Xander didn't respond to that, he simply pointed down the street. "Impressive like that?" He wondered warily.

Giles looked past his shoulder, just in time to see that a dark, hooded figure was standing in front of the building, and it raised its hand, which was aglow with supernatural red energy, as strong and bright as any flame. "Yes, that's more like it," he agreed, as the sizzling bolt of energy was thrown directly at them.


	9. Chapter 9

Giles barely had time to throw up a protective spell, and as the power slammed into it, the spell dissipated like it had been made of tissue paper. Angel threw his sword, and Naomi sent out a shock of electricity, but by the time both hit their targets, the man (?) was gone. "I hate the disappearing ones!" Xander exclaimed, but he failed to disguise the tension in his voice.

All Giles could conjure up was another type of protective spell, but he already knew it wouldn't hold any longer than the first one. He needed a better idea what he was dealing with to adequately formulate a response, and he had a feeling he wasn't going to get the chance to figure it out. That was the whole point, was it not?

He felt a burst of energy from behind them, hard enough to send a physical shock through his spine, and as he turned to face their attacker, he saw that everyone else was frozen in place, although the electricity Naomi had gathered continued to drip off her hands, as it wasn't a biological entity. He could see standing in the middle of the street, a dark clad, familiar figure. "Santerelli," he grumbled, wondering if there was anything he could conjure up that would help. Santerelli was a combat spellcaster for the Council, and this brought up some awful possibilities. "Don't tell me - the Council would like a word with me?"

He grunted in ill humor. Santerelli was a short but broad shouldered man with short, curly black hair and black eyes, a master of the white and black arts. If they sent him, the Council meant business. "I think the time for talking has past, don't you?"

That was never a good way to start a discussion. "What are you going to do to them?"

Santerelli looked at the frozen tableau of Angel, Bren, Naomi, and Xander, and shrugged. "I wasn't sent for them. You should be more concerned about yourself, Rupert." He held his hands several inches apart, as if cradling an invisible globe, and molten orange energy began to fill the gap between his palms. If he wasn't wrong, that was an immolation spell. Oh joy.

He searched his mind frantically for a counter spell that he could use without any special prep, when quite suddenly the fire in his hands died. Even Santerelli looked confused, his eyebrows scrunching down into an almost demonic V as he glared down at his own hands.

"Really?" A man's voice said. "This is the best the Council's got? Merde."

He looked back towards the building that housed Angel Investigations. Standing in front of it was Ruby, wearing a cable knit blue sweater, canvas pea coat, and khaki pants that seemed too hot for the L.A. weather (if you could call it that), and standing beside her was a sleek man in a long coat who also looked overdressed, but could have been an agent or a movie producer of some sort. Dear lord, was that Mordred?

"Carlo," Ruby chided, shaking her head in disbelief. "I thought you were better than this. Doing the Council's dirty work."

Everyone was unfrozen, and deeply confused. "What the hell just happened?" Angel asked him.

Xander looked at Ruby and clearly didn't recognize her, but he recognized the man beside her. "Oh no, it's the French guy again."

Mordred scowled at him. "The name's Mordred, Human."

"Which is kind of sucky," Xander replied flippantly. "And I know about sucky names, 'cause mine's Xander."

It was Santerelli's turn to frown. "Mordred? Aren't you dead?"

"How do you kill magic?" he replied sharply.

"Who's the British chick?" Xander asked.

Ruby raised an eyebrow at him, her gaze harsh and unforgiving. If he'd known who she was, he'd probably have been wetting his pants. "Did you just call me a "chick"?"

Angel raised his hands, and said firmly, "Hold it." He then pointed at Santerelli. "You are?"

He looked like he didn't want to answer, but he glanced at Mordred and Ruby and realized there was no point in holding out, but he still didn't like it. "Carlo Santerelli. I'm a combat spellcaster for the Watcher's Council."

Xander gaped in shock. "You _had_ those? Why didn't they ever send any to Sunnydale?!"

Everybody ignored Xander, which was typical. Angel turned towards Ruby and pointed at her. "And you are?"

"Ruby Von Allman, ex-Watcher, friend of Giles. And why must I explain myself to you, vampire?"

Annoyance flashed through Angel's eyes, but he let it go. He turned to him instead, and asked, "Giles, why is the Council hunting you?"

Here again was a conversation he never wanted to have. But he broke it down as succinctly as he could, leaving out details here and there, such as Logan and Kier being in Toronto hunting for the Brotherhood of Vestus. It was more than likely that the Council didn't know about them, and he wasn't about to mention them in front of Carlo. To say Angel looked nonplused was perhaps an understatement.

"It gets better," Mordred chimed in, with gleeful ill humor. "The Ascendant is the vessel the vampires are looking for. Isn't that great? You guys are better than Monty Python sometimes."

Giles looked to Ruby. "Is that true?"

She nodded grimly. That was horrible - how could the Council allow such a thing to happen? No wonder they were killing to cover it up.

"And this has what to do with us?" Naomi wondered. "Except for coming after you, of course."

"It's a … long story," he finally said. "I think we may have a more pressing issue to deal with." He looked at Carlo, and everybody followed suit, until Carlo shifted nervously, although he did his best to looked dignified and unafraid. He almost succeeded.

"Oh yes," Ruby agreed ominously. "What are we going to do with you?"

"I have some suggestions," Mordred said. "And one of them might be legal in some states."

"We have to send a message to the Council," Ruby said, and it sounded like a warning. "Or they'll keep after us."

Which was true, and Carlo suddenly looked very nervous, sweat starting to bead on his forehead. "You don't want to make this worse," he cautioned, as if he was honestly trying to help them.

"You mean that's possible?" Giles asked curiously.

Carlo knew better than to answer that, but then again, that wasn't the type of question that had an answer.

Giles wondered how Kier and Logan were doing, and hoped that they were doing a bit better.

8

So, his entire life was a lie. Wonderful.

Of course this was a vampire death cult leader, so he could just be fucking with him. It wasn't like he wasn't in a shitty spot, what with Logan holding him by the throat and Marc standing by, ready to paralyze him or stake him, whatever the case may have been, with the figuratively glowing shirtless Rags standing there, ready to grab him and make him light up like winter bonfire. He may have just been digging a figurative knife in since he had no chance of actually doing it with a real one.

He was implying that his parents knew they were "special" and had to keep a low profile, which was why this clown - and he said his name was Revol, but Kier knew a clumsy stage name when he heard one - was shocked that they "let" Kier pursue an acting career. He felt there was also an undercurrent of "let you be gay", but of course he didn't say it, because he really didn't want Marc to kill him. The shock was made worse when they discovered another vampire had changed him.

"So why the hell did you get the kid up here?" Logan growled, giving him a brief, hard shake. If Revol had been Human, he'd probably would have suffocated from having all the bones in his neck crushed by now. "If he's already a vamp, you can't undo it."

Revol glared at him, not wanting to say anymore, but Dolph apparently thought of Logan as some kind of colleague thanks to the war experience only he remembered. With a brief amount of hesitation, he volunteered. "There's a ritual that would have allowed Vestus to enter the vessel anyways. Since he'd be the stronger entity -"

"Would you shut the fuck up?" Revol snapped.

Dolph ignored him. " - we assumed Vestus would kill off the other vampire."

"What if you were wrong?"

"Uh, hey," Kier interjected. "I don't want to be anyone's vessel, okay? Hell, I don't even want to be a vampire in the first place! Thanks for asking and all."

The look Revol gave him could have stripped paint. "It's your destiny, imbecile. You were made to be a vampire."

"Fuck you! I don't believe that!"

Logan scowled, looking around. "Where the hell's Dru?"

Oh damn it. They all glanced around, but clearly the batty vamp had flown the coop … to totally mix several different metaphors. Logan shook Revol again, who was looking really pissed off about that. "Where'd she go?"

"How the hell am I supposed to know?! That crazy bitch does shit I don't even wanna think about!"

"She probably just ran off," Dolph said. "She was terrified of you."

Logan snorted disdainfully. "She should be. So where the hell's Kayla? And she'd better be alive."

"She is," Dolph said hurriedly. "We kept her alive on the off chance the ceremony didn't work, and … Kier's death would pass on the ability, whatever it is."

Kier gaped at him in disbelief. "Wait - if the ritual didn't work, you were gonna dust me?"

Dolph had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed. "If worse came to worst, yeah."

"It'd be a mercy killing at this point," Revol sneered at him.

Logan punched a single set of claws right through Revol's gut, letting the vampire go so he could double over in a soundless scream before he yanked his claws out with needless violence and made him drop to his knees, clutching the gaping wound of his gut. "You forget who's in charge here?" Logan snapped. "I don't really have a reason to keep you alive anymore, do I?" He glanced at the big Russian. "What's your name?"

"Jack. Well, er, that's what people call me now."

"What's your real name?"

He looked unwilling to answer, but after a moment, admitted, "Sergey."

Logan nodded. "Sounds better." He then reached down and hauled Revol back to his feet, bringing him face to face with him. "Okay, dirt bag, do we get a location, or do I start lopping off bits?"

He sneered, but it was cut by a grimace of pain. "She's in a warehouse on Baldwin Street. I'll take you there."

"No, you'll tell us where to find it."

He snorted, which brought a bit of blood to his pale lips. "And give you a reason to kill me? I don't think so."

Logan smirked in a way that would have made his blood run cold - if, in fact, the undead had a proper circulatory system. "I don't need a reason to kill you. Keep that in mind." He turned and hauled Revol around with him in a single graceful motion, then shoved him forward. The vampire stumbled and almost lost his balance, making him look incredibly undignified. "Lead on, shithead."

Kier was glad Logan had taken over, because he was still trying to grasp all this. If you could believe these vampires - and why would he? - he was the culmination of a legacy of lies, and was at his core not quite Human. Oh, he was mostly Human, but he had some other little bit, one that gave him an edge over other vampires, and just maybe allowed him to retain some sense of self. But that meant his continuous suspicion that he was a better vampire than he ever was a Human was true, and he never could have been a good Human - it just wasn't in his nature, wasn't what he was intended to be.

No! How could he believe that? He didn't believe in "predestination" or any of that stuff - shit happened! Maybe some people could see it coming, some psychics or oracles or whatever, but they couldn't see everything. (Could they?) If he believed this, he'd have to believe his entire life was a complete waste of time; he was born solely to die. And how did you live with that? (So to speak.) How did you accept that? He wasn't sure he could. If he did … why did he go on? What was the point? If he had to die to live, he shouldn't still be hanging around. The thought was stunning in its implacable gloominess.

Revol led them back through the night shadowed park, with Logan right behind him, claws still out. (If he cared about anybody else seeming them, it wasn't apparent.) Sergey/Jack followed him, with Marc close enough to reach out and grab him, and Kier was close to him, while Rags trailed after them, far enough back that the heat he gave off was minimal. It was like a conga line of the damned, an idea which would normally fill his head with amusing pictures, but he couldn't quite manage it this time. He knew he should have been happy that Kayla was alive (if she indeed was), as that was what he came here for. He didn't care about the whole Ascendant thing, or being a vessel for some big vamp kahuna in a wacky demon version of Scientology - none of that mattered. This could all be lies, every single bit, although he didn't know the purpose of it.

Damn. He missed Bren. He wished he was here, if only just to hash this out. Maybe he could've made some sense out of this that he couldn't. He was smarter than he was, and he never forgot a damn thing.

They were a few hundred meters out from the entrance of the park, and in a rather dark part of the bike path, where trees loomed up on either side, blotting out the dim light of the moon and the few artificial lights around the grounds. Logan paused suddenly, grabbing Revol by the shoulder to stop him too, and glanced up. Kier looked up too, didn't see anything, and then realized Logan was flaring his nostrils, sniffing into the breeze. He followed suit, just to see if he could pick up something. Marc was looking out into the darkness, and reported, "Multiple contacts, both heat and cold. Dead men walkin' and probably something this side of lizard."

Logan grunted, flexing his neck and making something in his shoulders crack with a sound that was just vaguely metallic. "Should've known the Ressiks wouldn't give up that easy." He pulled Revol closer to him, and put a single claw across the base of his neck. "Show yourself now, or your boss is compost," Logan called out into the dark.

Marc had already grabbed his big rifle off his back and was aiming it into the night, sweeping it back and forth in slow arcs. Kier could sense what he was seeing, but probably not as clearly. He could only feel the living ones, the ones with blood pumping through their veins, even if it was too tainted for him to drink. Fellow vampires were simply annoying little buzzing gnats in his peripheral vision.

A Ressik appeared ahead of them on the path, dressed in jeans and a dark t-shirt, his skin a rather spinach-y shade of green. His yellow eyes almost seemed to glow as he smirked, his lipless mouth curving up in what could have been a smile or a leer; it was hard to tell. "Go ahead and kill him," he told Logan casually. "We've already been paid."

Logan didn't, but he didn't look impressed. "What do you want?"

"Technically? For you people to stop this nonsense. If you don't give yourselves up and come along quietly right now, we're gonna start killing people at random all throughout this park. Oh sure, you'll stop us eventually, but how many people will be dead by then? A dozen? Two? What do you think?" He pulled a wrinkled pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and tapped one out. "C'mon man, time's a wasting. Tick tock. What's it gonna be? Mass slaughter or a reasonable discussion? Make your choice."

They all looked to Logan and waited for him to decide. Kier couldn't help but think that, either way, they were going to lose.


	10. Chapter 10

9

It was like stepping back in time.

They were in a long hallway hung with tasteful (and expensive) classical landscapes and sparsely furnished with small side tables and expensive vases, reproductions of Ming and Yuan Dynasty era ones as well as Dutch Delft pieces. It looked exactly like one of the corridors in the London headquarters; even the ecru color of the walls was precisely the same shade. Perhaps it was meant to be comforting, but honestly it was creepy. Had they simply replicated the old building in a new place? Or was this some bit of misplaced nostalgia? A stab at "tradition"? Giles hoped they realized how insane it was, no matter what urged them to do this in the first place.

Large doors opened on just what he expected to find - a library with wall to wall shelves, broken up only by a large window giving a slightly startling view of the Sydney skyline. (He was expecting, out of habit, a view of London.) The shelves were full of books, some so old they shouldn't have been exposed to air, and plush overstuffed armchairs gave an illusion of warmth, while mahogany wood gave the furniture and shelves a slightly pretentious touch of class. The carpet was a dark red, like old blood, and he knew that wasn't coincidence. There was a short, wiry man standing behind a rather ostentatious desk, and he stiffened in surprise as Giles came in, followed by Ruby and Mordred. "What the hell are you people doing here?" He snapped, then glared at Mordred. "And who the bloody hell are you?"

"I'm Gandalf," Mordred replied facetiously, closing the doors behind them.

The wiry man was Gordon Hamilton, the new head of the Watchers Council. He was actually a Scot, with a thick mane of silver hair and eyes as dark as licorice drops, but the most galling thing about him - to Giles, at least - was he was ten years younger than him. He never did like taking orders from people younger than him. Maybe it was an unreasonable prejudice on his part, or maybe it depended on the person. For instance, Ruby was younger than he was, but he had no trouble taking orders from her, but then again, he had little doubt that Ruby could kick his ass, and he knew she had more field experience than most random two Watchers combined.

Gordon reached out to something on the desk - it looked like he was pressing a button, but Mordred shook his head. "I've isolated this area of the building in a time bubble. Unless you can cross the dimensional barrier, you're out of luck."

Gordon glared at him, his jaw muscles tensing and twitching beneath his skin. "You really expect me to believe you're that powerful a wizard?"

"Look out the window."

He did so with great reluctance, constantly looking back at them as if expecting a physical attack the moment his back was turned, but his brief glance became a double take, and he openly stared out the window. The scene was the same, the city of Sydney with a blue slice of water visible at the edge of the horizon, but everything had frozen: there was no movement in the water or the sky, and all the cars on the road looked parked. There was even a sea bird frozen in mid-flight. Time hadn't actually stopped out there or in here; Mordred had simply erected a dimensional "bubble", so time passed in different, mutually exclusive ways. It sounded more complicated than it actually was, but required an amount of power and control he would never pretend to have, and he was certain that the Council had no one on site who could handle it.

Gordon cursed softly and rubbed his eyes, which he kept doing as he turned back towards them. "We have all the time in the world," Mordred pointed out. "So I'd cooperate if I were you."

He collapsed in his desk chair with a heavy sigh, and asked, "What is it you want? Revenge? Isn't that a little petty for you, Rupert?"

"What, you're not crediting me with it?" Ruby asked.

Gordon just shrugged. "I kind of expect it of you, Ruby."

She glowered at him, rolling up her sleeves. "Right, that's it - I'm bitin' you."

He looked slightly alarmed and rolled his chair back from his desk as Ruby advanced on him, but Giles grabbed her arm and stopped her. "Hamilton, this has gone too far," he said, trying to get things back on track. "Too many people know about the Ascendant project; I even found someone who could translate the documents. You can't make this just go away."

"You found a Russian scholar?"

"Not exactly." He wasn't even going to attempt to explain Logan, mainly because he wasn't sure he could. "But the genie's out of the bottle and you can't force it back. We just have to deal with it now in a non-lethal way."

He found a word he liked in there. "Non-lethal? Does that mean you're not going to kill me?"

"That depends on you," Mordred said menacingly.

Giles flashed him a scolding look, and told Gordon, "No, we're not. But we're not going to let you kill us either, so I think it's in all of our best interests to come to an understanding, don't you?"

He ran a hand through his hair, trying to buy some time to think, and conceded, "I don't think I have much choice in the matter, do I?"

"Nope," Mordred agreed.

After a minute or so had passed, Gordon appeared to steel himself, as if to ask something he knew couldn't be taken well, and finally said, "I need to know how much you know about this."

"I think you already know."

He didn't like that answer. "Do you know where the Ascendant is?"

So that was confirmation they existed, and that the Watchers must have realized that the Brotherhood of Vestus was after them. He had no idea who the Ascendant was, but he suddenly wondered why the Brotherhood had drawn Kier and Logan up to Toronto. If you thought about it - and as Logan himself had brought up, it sounded like the Watchers were experimenting with mutants - Logan would have made an excellent candidate. He shuddered to think what would happen if a vampire inhabited his body. "No. Why? Is it important?"

He scoffed. "Of course it's important, Rupert. We have to kill them before the Brotherhood finds them, or it'll be a disaster of apocalyptic proportions."

Oh dear. So much for non-lethal methods.

* * *

Logan glared at the Ressik, giving him a look that really should have made the demon turn and run screaming for his life, but Ressiks were just too macho to do that. "You could kill 'em anyways. I have no reason to trust you."

The demon shrugged a single shoulder casually. "Except having mass slaughter on your hands. C'mon, fuzzy, at this rate it's gonna happen when you're still trying to make up your mind."

Rags had muttered something under his breath, and Logan heard the "whump" of his sudden teleportation. The Ressik stared over his shoulder, slightly alarmed. "Hey, where the fuck did tattoos go?"

"He's a Stansin - he probably ran back to our hotel." It was easier to classify him as a coward than to try and guess what the hell Rags was up to. He was guessing he hadn't abandoned them, but he had no idea what he was intending to do. Go get reinforcements?

The Ressik seemed willing to believe that, but then Marc audibly dropped something - it made a dull metallic sound as it hit the ground - and the last thing Logan saw was the Ressik's big mouth opening to say something before Marc suddenly wrapped what he assumed to be his jacket around his head (it smelled like it) as he shouted, "Brace yourself!"

He had barely a millisecond to do that, as there was a loud bang that burst both his eardrums simultaneously, a pain like a donkey had just kicked his head from the inside of his skull, and he was instantly woozy, feeling deeply disoriented and hearing nothing but a white noise hum. He though he'd seen a flash of light beneath the hem of the leather jacket Marc had thrown over his head, and he could feel Marc still had his arms around him. He was holding him up, but he had also buried his head in his back, and was just now loosening his grip and looking up.

Why? Logan had already figured it out, as he knew that particular pain and silence quite well: Marc had just thrown a flash bang grenade. There was no way to keep him from losing his hearing - that must have been the "Brace yourself!" - but by throwing his jacket over his head he'd spared him the temporary blindness. He probably had to hide his head in his back to try and avoid blindness for himself.

Logan pulled the jacket off and looked at the Ressik, who was still reeling, soundlessly screaming and clawing at his oversized eyes. The flash bang was probably even more disorienting to him, considering the size of his eyes, and Revol, Sergey, and Kier looked to be holding their heads in pain, but they were vampires, so they'd be fine. Besides, Kier was the only one to worry about, and hell, he was a "special" vampire, which probably meant he'd recover faster than most.

He felt a bit off balance, as suddenly losing your hearing could do that to you, but he adapted, as he seemed to adapt to many things; the nature of his mutation wasn't just healing, or at least it seemed that way to him - it was also dealing instantaneously with all the shit life and other people threw at you. He was on the Ressik before he knew anyone else was even there, and a backhand swipe of his claws sent his head flying from his body. It probably was a mercy killing, considering the state he was in.

The flash bang had probably startled everyone, and that's when Logan got the full genius of Marc's plan: a flash of light that bright and an explosion that loud would send people fleeing out of the park like a shot. They'd probably think it was terrorists or something, setting off a bomb in downtown Toronto to protest … what? Tim Horton's coffee shop domination? The Leafs sucking like a Hoover? And any other Ressiks and vampires who were near by would be blind and deaf too, meaning they couldn't hunt as effectively. The only problem was, how much time did they have before they recovered and came after them?

Oh fuck, it didn't matter - he'd recover first, and Marc knew that as well.

They probably didn't have long before the cops showed up, along with whatever potential anti-terrorism units they had out here, "just in case". Which meant also that there'd be too many armed and jumpy Humans for the demons to deal with, giving them yet another reason to split. Of course this meant they had to hoof it too, but this shouldn't take him long. Marc had terminally screwed their plan - all Logan had left to do was a little clean up. He felt something trickling down his ears, and wasn't sure if it was sweat or blood, and figured it didn't matter either way.

He looked at Marc, and he looked back as he finished shrugging his jacket back on, so he must have saved his own eyesight if not his hearing. He gestured to the vampires, and Marc nodded in understanding, hefting his rifle and briefly the punching the air with it, basically telling him visually that the first vamp to try anything was going to get a slug where it would hurt even them. Logan gestured at the woods behind them, and Marc nodded and gestured for him to go, but then tapped his wrist and held up two fingers: two minutes. Marc probably figured that was all the time they could spare before they had to get out of here ahead of the cops. He nodded, gave him a thumbs up, and tore off towards the woods, letting the thuds of his own footfalls reverberating through his body fill the space left by silence.

He killed a couple of vampires and Ressiks and barely even stopped running, just slashed out, and they were so disoriented by the flash bang that they never even knew he was there. The farther he went in the woods, the more together and unaffected the demons were, but most turned and ran as soon as they spotted him, figuring keeping their heads was the better part of valor. There really were fewer people in the park than there had been only minutes earlier; that grenade had been better than an air raid siren. He'd been looking for Dru, assuming she'd been the one who'd come back with reinforcements, but he hadn't seen her, and doubted he was going to. She'd probably already run off, for good this time. Yeah, she was nuttier than alligator in a goldfish bowl, but you didn't need to set a grenade off in her face for her to get the hint that her side was losing.

He'd come out in one of the park's open spaces, both Human and demon free, and he realized the sharp, high pitched noise he'd started hearing had become a deeper hum, accompanied by an odd fluttering sound, like he'd gotten a month trapped in his head. But he knew by now that was just his eardrums repairing themselves, and he was literally hearing the progress as it went along. He'd probably have all his hearing back in under two minutes.

He sensed the disturbance of air beside him, and whirled in time to see Rags had materialized there. He was talking to him, looking sweaty and nervous, but he couldn't hear him yet. He was able to read his lips, though … well, partially. He saw _"What the hell was that?" _in between words he just missed.

Logan hoped he was speaking in a normal voice, and replied that Marc had set off a flash bang to derail the Ressick, then asked him where the hell he went. He didn't know if he was speaking in the correct tone or not, he still couldn't hear himself, but he could feel the vibrations in his throat as he made the words, and it didn't feel like shouting.

Rags didn't look at him funny either, so he figured he'd done okay. Rags spoke really fast, or his Cockney accent impacted how he formed vowels and syllables - which made sense, since he had a tendency to pronounce "th" sounds as "f", and elided like mad. But among the confusing mishmash and vague hand gestures, he saw the word "evacuate", and he guessed that Rags had decided to try and get some of the Humans out of the park like he'd gotten people out of the library. It was a good plan, humane, but Marc's had been a bit better.

See, that's exactly why he loved the guy. He could even have a perfectly wordless conversation with him that was completely understandable - thanks to his military background? Who knew really. It was just he really needed to try and shove him into the X-Men. No matter Captain Buzzkill's objections to his casual violence or Xavier's objections to weapons, Marc could think on his feet, and the guy could fight, damn it - you never had enough quick thinking fighters on a tactical team. Even Scott couldn't argue with that.

He told him they had to get back and get going before the cops got there, and Rags didn't even ask; he just grabbed his arm and teleported them back to the group. By this time Kier had straightened up, but he had tears running from violently red rimmed eyes, and it wasn't clear if he could see yet, or hear, or anything. Still, he looked better than Revol and Sergey, which Logan felt proved his point. Rags said something, but turned away from him so he had no hope of seeing it, but now he could hear muffled words; it was like his ears were crammed full of cotton wool, but rudimentary sounds were starting to get through. He couldn't hear enough to make any sense of the sounds, but at least he had solid proof of his recovery.

Marc stared at Rags intently, clearly reading Rags's lips with the same amount of difficulty he was having earlier, but he got the gist of what he was saying, tapped Kier's shoulder, and then put his hand on Revol's shoulder. Kier got it, and moved behind Revol and Sergey to grab them both by the shoulder. Marc grabbed Kier's arm, Logan grabbed his, and then Rags grabbed his arm. A little humanoid daisy chain that made teleporting them all en masse a simple thing, but as soon as they were ripped out of here and shoved out into an alley a couple blocks south of their hotel, Kier staggered a bit, still having trouble adjusting to Rags' rather abrupt and comfortless teleports. But that was okay, as it hit Revol and Sergey even harder; they fell against the nearest wall, sagging like alcoholics who had just surpassed their own tolerance levels, and it looked like they wanted to barf but couldn't, probably because vampires didn't barf. (He had no idea; he'd just never seen one do it.)

Street noises were coming back to him, and he could hear the muffled, distant wails of a chorus of sirens heading towards High Park, as well as a few car alarms, which were either being set off by the sirens now or had been set off by the violence of the flash bang. "Okay," Logan said, just to see if he could hear himself now - yes, he could. He grabbed Revol and shoved him hard enough against the wall to make him look at him with his red rimmed, angry eyes. "Can you hear me? Fuck it, I don't care, it doesn't matter." He held his claws up right to his face, and that message didn't need words behind it. "We're going to Kayla, and no more bullshit, no more double crossing crap, or I'll leave you a limbless torso that'll fry when the sun comes up." He then asked, "You get me?" but it took him a moment to realize he'd said it in Russian.

But that may have been for the best. He got him loud and clear, whether he could genuinely hear or not, and he got the sense, reflected in the sullen dullness in his eyes, that all the fight had finally been kicked out of Revol. He could almost feel bad for him - what must it have been like to lead a cult that bled members every year, that struggled to rebuild itself after decimation, and never quite became anything but a shred of a shadow of its former self?

Yeah, that was really sad. He'd have to pencil in a cry about that later.


	11. Chapter 11

10

They had Kayla in a run down farmhouse outside of Toronto, where it started to become more suburban and rural, the urban sprawl receding ever so slightly. They'd kept her drugged so she'd be docile and unable to say what was actually going on, and this benefited them greatly, just in case his abilities - whatever they were (and they hadn't exactly told him, leading Kier to believe that they honestly didn't know) - happened to jump to her when he died, if he died. But if they were more than Human, wasn't she slightly superhuman anyways? Maybe it was always best to keep her sedated from their perspective.

He still wasn't getting any of this, and while he could see relatively okay, his ears were still ringing a little. He had no idea a flash-bang grenade could be so bright or so loud; for a moment it was a white hot brightness, like the sun, and he thought he and the Russian vamps were going to flash fry into ash. Then when they didn't, he wondered if it had just fried their retinas, and if those would grow back.

Marc could have warned the rest of them, not just Logan. He was a little pissed off at him for a while, even though he knew he Marc had made the only logical choice: they needed someone who could still function even if they were deaf and blind, and could take on the vampires and Ressiks all alone if necessary. That was Logan; it certainly wasn't him. Still, a little head's up would have been nice. Not that it would have helped - the light had screamed through his eyelids like the thin scraps of flesh they were.

There were vamps guarding her, of course, but they were easy to kill. She was unconscious when they arrived, and remained unconscious when they got back to the hotel, so they let her sleep on the bed while they tried to figure out what their next move was. Marc had plastic ties, the kind the cops often used to handcuff people nowadays (precisely what _didn't_ he have?! Kier bet if they needed a rocket launcher, a brick of C4, nipple clamps, seven 3x5 cards, and a professional glossy head shot Marc would just pull them out of his backpack), so they cuffed both Revol and Sergey and tossed them into the closet, not sure what else to do with them. Kier had an idea, but he didn't know if they'd listen to his suggestion.

"If this is the entirety of the cult - and it looks like it - we're done here," Marc said, between gulps from the can of cherry Pepsi he bought from the hallway vending machine. "Let's just kill 'em and get gone. The threat's over."

There was a muffled _"Hey" _from the closet.

"Kill 'em in cold blood?" Rags replied. He was sitting on the end of the bed, still shirtless and covered in the marks they'd drawn on him. They were still working too; Kier couldn't get within three feet of him before feeling the burn. "I dunno. I mean, I know they're vampires and everyfing, but … it still seems wrong."

"They massacred a whole bunch of people and filmed it," Logan told him. He was standing against the wall, closest to the closet - a deliberate act, to remind them that if they tried anything, the guy who was never unarmed was right there to free them from their heads. They were being awfully nice and quiet in that closet. Revol had glared at Logan like he thought he could take him, but Sergey was as docile as a lamb, apparently aware he couldn't take him, and he didn't think Revol had a chance either. "Would you like to see? They weren't quick deaths."

Rags shuddered slightly. "I'll take your word on it."

"Come on, this is a happy ending," Marc said. "We don't get a lot of those. Let's take it and book before it all turns sour on us."

"Yer not an optimist, are you?" Rags asked him, somewhat factiously.

Marc shrugged, and blindly held the can of soda towards Logan, who gave it a funny look before taking it from him and finishing off the soda with a singe gulp. They were pretty much an action blockbuster buddy team waiting to happen, only you'd never really believe they'd be in genuine peril, and the trail of violence left in their wake would probably be Tarantino-esque, and he didn't do buddy action pictures. Also, he'd probably leave out the subtext of Marc having a clear man crush on the straight man he couldn't have. Kier wanted to scold him for giving into that stereotype when he was so un-stereotypical in every other respect, but after having to swallow a whimper over Logan's flat, rock hard stomach, he supposed he had to forgive him. If you liked butch guys, Logan was the butchest of the butchies - how did you not love that?

"I should be deciding what to do with them, shouldn't I?" Kier finally interjected.

They all looked at him, and Logan crumpled the aluminum can like it was a napkin and lobbed it towards the tiny plastic wastebasket near the bathroom. He nailed it. "You really wanna make that your call?" Logan asked him. He wasn't challenging him, he was just wondering if he really wanted to take on the burden all by himself.

"I want to have a talk with Revol. You can keep Sergey."

Marc had his protective black goggles raised and sitting on the top of his head, so Kier had a startling look at his big, black eyes, which seemed to be nothing but pupil. Was that why he saw in infrared? He wasn't sure how that worked; they were just a little eerie, and he kind of wished he'd lower his goggles. Logan had obviously seen them before, as he didn't react at all. "Sure you wanna do this by yourself kid? I'm more than happy to help." As he said that, Marc patted his side, where he had his stake hidden.

"This whole thing was about me. It may as well end with me."

Rags gave him a nervous look as Logan and Marc shared a knowing glance that was both dense and inscrutable. They had their own language and cues; they were enough alike that they almost had a kind of telepathy. Logan opened the closet and grabbed Revol, hauling him out by his arm. "Knock yourself out," he added, shoving the long haired vampire towards him. "Shout if you need help."

Revol gave Logan an evil look, but did a shocked double take when he saw Marc without the goggles. "What the fuck are you?" he asked. "Half Beezle demon?"

Marc flipped him his middle finger. "Sit and spin, asshat."

Kier grabbed Revol by his arm and started shoving him unceremoniously out the door. "With your haircut, you have no right to criticize anyone," he told him, pushing him out into the hall. There was no one there to notice him, the nobody actor with many a B movie under his belt, shoving around an '80's hair band reject with his hands cuffed behind his back. He was glad, as he had no idea how he'd explain it. They were making a porn video? Revol would probably hate that, so yes, that was exactly what he was going to say.

He pushed him into the elevator, and said, "Please try something. Please. I just need an excuse."

Revol stared at him, his eyes colder than those of any casting director he'd ever encountered. "Aren't you going to get these cuffs off me before you execute me? Or are you that scared of me?"

He scoffed. "That was the best you could do, huh? Logan must have really rattled you."

"He's a Human. He's cattle."

"Oh? Go up and kill him." Kier went to the elevator's control panel and slapped the stop button. "Go on, I dare you. Here, turn around, I'll cut the cuffs off so it's a fair fight." He made a "turn around" gesture with his hand, and Revol continued staring at him.

"Is that the best you can do? Sic your freak on me?"

"Sic him on you? How do you make cattle sic anyone? They just stand around and moo. Oh, wait - did you just admit you're too scared to go do it? Very subtle. The German judge gives you a five point four for honesty, but the French judge only gives you a two. Aww, but you know the French - they hate everyone who isn't them. Like Americans, but with better cheese."

His eyes narrowed to slits, his upper lip curling in a sneer. "I can't believe you're the Ascendant. A pretty little fag who still has a hard on for humanity. Your sister would have been better."

"Kayla was better at a lot of things than I was. She studied, for one thing. Me, I have a horrible time doing what people expect me to do - I've spent my life disappointing people. I think I'm doing a little better undead, but it's hard to tell since I fuck up so much."

"You'll get no argument from me."

"I didn't think I would." He walked right up to him, forcing Revol to back up until he was pressed against the wall. He looked uncomfortable, and smelled worse. "Tell me, oh fearless leader of Vestus, what happens to your king now? If the ritual isn't performed, if the usurper vamp remains inside me, what becomes of the thing I'm supposed to be?"

"Vestus is always with us; he is eternal. We can find a way to bring him back without your … corrupt body."

"Really? That's funny, 'cause I thought this whole thing was all about the fact that only one person could be a vessel for him, and that was me."

Revol's look was like stone. "If we'd known exactly who you were, we'd have found a way around it."

He smiled, but it had no warmth; it was just a smirk at his own thoughts. "That would have been better for everyone, don't you think?" He grabbed Revol by the shoulders and felt him stiffen as he spun him around and slammed him face first into the wall, using one hand and his knee to pin him there as he reached around to the back of his jeans.

"What are you doing?" Revol asked, his voice tight with restrained panic.

He thought of several evil jokes he could make, including telling him he had a really nice ass, but he wasn't in the mood to torment him. Kier suddenly felt exhaustion and a low grade depression settle on him like a lead cloak. He was born to die, and somehow he even fucked _that _up. He wasn't even made into a vampire correctly; the wrong one got a hold of him first. They didn't make a self-help book to cover that particular problem. "I'm getting the cuffs off you, jackass." He pulled out the knife he'd borrowed from Marc earlier and after a bit of sawing, he finally cut through the plastic. It was surprisingly tough stuff.

"You aren't letting me go," Revol said, nearly making it a question so full of hope it could've broken his heart. If he had actually cared; if this son of a bitch hadn't kidnapped his sister and been planning to sacrifice him for his god.

"What if I was? What kind of traitor would that make me?" He tucked the knife in the back of his pants, but kept Revol pinned to the wall. "What if you got the wrong impression of me?"

He licked his lips nervously, and did his best to look at him with his head turned to the side. "Did I?"

Kier considered that a moment. "No." He slammed the stake home, straight through Revol's back and out his heart. He shrieked and turned into dust, making Kier fall into the wall as he quickly regained his balance and put the stake back in his coat pocket.

All he wanted to know was if Vestus would be dead without him. If Revol was telling the truth, no, but it wouldn't be that easy to bring him back in someone else. He supposed that would have to do.

Glancing down at the pile of ash, he hit a button on the panel and the elevator ground to life once more, returning to its slow descent. He was sorry housekeeping was going to have to clean Revol up, but all in all it could have been a lot messier.

Not that he cared that much. Right now, all he wanted was a drink, and a quiet place to go and feel sorry for himself.

* * *

Logan and Marc decided to take Sergey out for a drink. Actually, Logan intended to do it alone, but Marc insisted on going with him. Maybe to keep an eye on Sergey, maybe because he wanted a beer - who knew?

They uncuffed him before leaving, because Sergey seemed to be under the impression that they were old friends - war buddies, as it were. Of course Logan didn't remember him, or it, or anything; he knew he'd supposedly been in World War Two, but no memories came with the name.

They got their beers at this dark little pub that was still open, just for sad sack drinkers like them, and Sergey told him about himself back then. Apparently the Russians were expecting a "soft" Westerner, some kind of prima donna they'd have to put up with until he got scared off or killed, whichever came first. But he surprised them by not caring about deprivation or low ammo or how cold it was, and eventually they considered him an honorary Russian. He could drink them all under the table, and had incredible luck, apparently surviving a direct grenade attack, and several incidents involving snipers and machine guns. Although Sergey admitted now that obviously luck had nothing to do with it.

Logan wasn't really surprised to hear any of this: he could fight, and could survive just about anything. No shock there. He didn't talk a lot, kept to himself, and eventually there was a falling out between him and the rest as he beat the shit out of a gunner that he thought was abusing a woman. As it was, the Russians and the Allies weren't able to work something out anyways, as neither side truly trusted the other, and logistics was too much of a bugger. But the general assessment of Logan by the Russians was they were shit scared of him, but no one was going to admit it. They figured the Allies had sent a "tough guy" so the Russians didn't think they were a bunch of "softies".

Logan listened to him speak, and wondered when he had made the decision to move on. He still wanted to know about his past, what he had missed - he'd had lives, and he wanted to know of them. He had two wives that he knew of, one son, all dead before their time, all because of him. But in his mind he had drawn a line, a line of his past that he decided to write off because it was too far from him now. He knew that the Logan Sergey was talking about wouldn't recognize the Logan sitting at this table, and vice versa - they'd be strangers to each other, sharing only the same face, the same body, the same damning curse in their veins. Their memories would diverge, their lives, even their personalities. This Logan, Canadian Special Forces Logan, was obviously a good soldier, a good man, a great Nazi smasher, and he was glad he'd been him at some point in his life. But he wasn't him anymore - that Logan had died a very long time ago. He just didn't know when he'd made the conscious decision to let that part of his past go. Maybe it was because he just had too much to look for, he knew he had to jettison some to keep himself sane. At some point, you just got tired of looking.

Marc seemed to be more interested in hearing the stories than he did, so he let him take over the conversation with Sergey and drank his beer, hoping Kier was all right. This was a lot of shit to get dumped on you all at once, and he was pretending that none of it was effecting him, but he just wasn't that good of an actor. At least they'd found Kayla alive - he hadn't expected that.

Once they'd finished their beers, he suggested they get going, as even this bar closed, late as it was. He tried to send a message to Marc to stay back, and he must have gotten it because he did, letting them take the lead and trailing ever so slightly behind.

Sunrise was a couple of hours away, but it was obvious Sergey felt it, as he was starting to get antsy. "So what are you gonna do to me?"

Logan just looked at him sidelong, not pausing in his gait. "What do ya think we should do with you?"

"I'm sorry about everything. If I'd known you were involved, I'd have told Revol we couldn't do this."

"Out of respect or out of fear?"

Sergey stopped and turned a smile on him. "It's all the same, isn't it? Or at least that's what we used to say."

Logan finally stopped and stared at him. He was what, thirty when he was changed? "See, we didn't. I have no memories from that era; that Logan is as good as dead. And Sergey, you aren't you - you haven't been you for a long time. You're a vampire. And you filmed Revol in that club. You even helped with the killings, didn't you?" Revol was stronger than he looked, but Sergey looked powerful, muscular like Revol wasn't - and as a good Russian soldier, he was sure Sergey had been - and strong enough to nail those people up to the wall. That's why the film didn't show Revol doing it; he may have done one or two of the small ones, but only Sergey was big enough to do the rest of them.

His smile died, and light in his eyes began to fade as he realized that Logan knew. To his credit, he didn't try and deny it. "I'm still a good soldier. I do as ordered. Surely you can understand that."

"We didn't accept that excuse from the Nazis, did we? And I'd never follow an order I didn't agree with - why do you think I'm not military anymore? I'm sorry, I really am. You probably deserved better than this." He didn't give Sergey time to ponder that. He simply swept up his arm, and popped his claws at the last second, cutting through his neck like butter. He was dust before his head could complete the fall from his shoulders.

"The real Sergey would have appreciated that." Marc said. "I mean, how fucked up is it that the thing that kills you gets to take over your body? At least serial killers only bury you in a landfill. Well, if you're lucky."

He raised an eyebrow at him. "I forgot how morbid you are."

"I'm not morbid. I haven't brought up cannibalism yet."

"I admire your restraint."

"You oughta." He flashed him his patented shit eating grin, and Logan had to look away before he caught him grinning too.

They started walking back to the hotel, and while the noise of cars was an ever-present background sound, it was easy to believe they were the last two people on planet earth, as the entire block was deserted save for them. But then Logan heard the slurred obscenities of a drunken fight starting on the next block over, and the illusion was ruined. "So what's up for you now?" Marc asked.

Logan shrugged. "Gotta go back to L.A. and fill in Giles on this whole mess, I suppose. Then I have no idea. Why?"

"I got a gig coming up, and I could use you. It's just a corporate espionage gig, but I could use somebody to watch my back, and having an interpreter along wouldn't hurt either."

He sighed dramatically. "People always want to use me for my body or my mind. Why doesn't anyone want me for me?"

"Because you're a curmudgeonly pain in the ass."

"Fair enough."

On their way back, Marc told him about the "gig", and it didn't sound so bad; it didn't sound like he'd be shot up and have to jump into a chopper a few dozen stories over Hong Kong, which was always a bonus.

Besides, after all of this, a change of scenery might be a good idea.

* * *

Epilogue

When they arrived at Angel Investigations, things looked perfectly unchanged.

Xander was on the couch, pointing something out in a magazine to Naomi, who looked only half awake, even though it was afternoon. Bren was behind the desk, working on his computer, although the only difference this time was Saddiq was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder.

As they came in, they all looked at them. "Hey hey, where the white women at?" Marc exclaimed cheerfully, and Logan grimaced, trying not to laugh at his stupid joke. He figured Marc could teach him something about always keeping your sense of humor, but it was possible that what Marc made funny would only seem obnoxious coming from him.

"Marc!" Naomi replied happily. "How are you?"

"Kicking ass, taking names, you know the drill," he said.

Bren got up and came around the desk. "Kier? I thought you were gonna call me -" His slightly scolding sentence was cut off as Kier embraced him desperately, holding on to Bren as if for dear life. He looked puzzled, but hugged him back. "Uh, okay. Are you all right?"

"Yeah, I just missed you," Kier told him. Logan had no idea if he'd ever tell him the truth or not, but that was his decision.

Giles came out from the back office and looked at him expectantly, wanting to talk to him but not eager to tip his hand and admit it. To make it easier on all of them, he asked to talk to him in private, and Giles invited him back into Angel's office. Angel had a late night last night, and apparently wasn't up yet.

Logan told him what had happened with the Brotherhood of Vestus and how Kier was apparently the Ascendant, which seemed to surprise him. Giles had a story of his own, involving the Watchers and Mordred, and how he'd reached a kind of détente with the Watchers Council. He wasn't reinstated, but they weren't going to try and kill him or erase his memories, which was a victory of sorts. He got a sense that Giles was holding something back, not telling him something, but he figured if it was important he'd have coughed it up.

Out in the main office, Marc was still entertaining everyone with stories he was probably making up or embellishing wildly, and Xander looked a little annoyed at having his thunder stolen by a much more entertaining person. Kier was still sticking close to Bren, he had his arm around his shoulders, and he hoped those two worked it out. They did make a cute couple.

When he and Marc finally left, Saddiq followed them out into the hall. "Where are you guys going?" he asked, almost nervously. That was nearly rude of him, although it wasn't rude at all - but in Sid's perception, it was bound to seem that way.

"Zurich," Logan replied, and gestured to Marc. "He's got a gig, and he doesn't speak Swiss."

"I dig the cheese, though," he added with a smile.

Sid looked slightly confused. Oh, he got humor, he just didn't always get Marc. "Oh. Um … I was wondering if … I mean, if you don't mind …"

"Spit it out, kid," Logan told him, not unkindly.

He took that as a direct order from a superior. "I was wondering if I might go with you. Sir."

"Knock off the sir shit," Logan advised him, then looked at Marc. "What d'ya think? He's good muscle."

Marc made a show of studying him, hemming and hawing, before finally asking, "Why you wanna go with us?"

He looked down at the floor sheepishly, his dark olive complexion hiding the blush that was surely there. "Because I'm bored." It never even occurred to him to lie.

"Good enough for me," Marc said. "Let's roll."

As he headed down the hallway, Sid looked to him for guidance. "Is he serious?"

"Believe it or not, yeah." Logan clapped him on the shoulder, and said, "Follow our lead, kid, and you'll do just fine."

He nodded with almost heartbreaking confidence. Well, this was going to be a learning experience for Sid, no doubt about it.

Logan just wasn't sure if that was good or bad.

* * *

So Kier was the Ascendant? That made things … difficult.

It did explain some things about him, though. He'd never been precisely a "normal" vampire, if there even was such a creature, and perhaps it explained why Wolfram and Hart selected him as the "mole".

Which Giles knew was just another problem If they knew Kier was the Ascendant and if they found out the Brotherhood had failed, they might try to bring Vestus back in Kier just to cause those problems on an apocalyptic scale. Hamilton was right - the continuing existence of the Ascendant was a threat. It would be difficult to bring back Vestus in a vampire, but not impossible, certainly not for a group with Wolfram and Hart's resources. The best thing to do would be to kill him now, ending the threat once and for all.

After several moments of agonizing soul searching, he called Gordon and informed him that both the Brotherhood and the Ascendant were dead. Technically it wasn't a lie - being a vampire, Kier _was_ dead.

He hung up the phone and sat behind Angel's desk with his head in his hands. It may have been the right thing to do, but he still couldn't see himself killing Brendan's boyfriend. Besides, a "good" vampire was hard to find, and always worthy to have in battle on your side.

Unless he turned on you, of course. Unless he was taken over by a powerful vampiric spirit, capable of uniting all the world's vampire clans into a single fighting force.

Oh god, he hoped he didn't live to regret this.

* * *

**The End**


End file.
